Guidance for guest bloggers on UKCL

We frequently accept opinion pieces, news items or other topical posts from guest bloggers on our website. Below is some guidance aimed at those thinking of writing for the UK Copyright Literacy blog. If you have an idea for a blog post we’d love to hear from you, but do read this blog post first!

1) Think of your audience – our readers have an interest in copyright literacy and copyright education, although they tend not to be lawyers. Therefore we are usually looking for stories that relate to the way in which you might teach others about copyright or a significant development that might have an impact on education or the broader cultural heritage sector. For that reason we also ask you avoid legal jargon where possible, or add in some explanation and plenty of links to where people can find out more.

2) Length – we are typically looking for pieces of between 1000-2000 words. If you have a lot to say, then we suggest you might want to plan more than one blog posts. Our readers are looking for concise and accessible pieces of writing.

3) Licensing and copyright – you retain copyright in anything you write for our blog, however we do ask if you can grant a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA) for the text of the post, to allow others to re-publish or re-use your text. We are aware that you may wish to include photos in the blog post and we don’t expect you to publish your own photos with the same licence or (or this may not be possible). See more about photos below.

4) Photos – we like our blog posts to be illustrated with images. If you have your own photos then that’s great, if you are using photos from elsewhere then we recommend you find some public domain or Creative Commons-licensed images and provide the attribution information for us. As we said above, we make it clear to readers of our blog that photos are not licensed in the same way as the text, but you will need to get permission to include the images or ensure they are openly licensed.

5) Biography – we would like you to supply us with a short biography about yourself and ideally a recent photograph. We like to introduce our guest bloggers and a short biography provides our readers with information about you, where you work and your interests in copyright. You can also include links to your website or twitter account and point readers to where they can read more of your work.

6) Stance – in our professional lives we represent and advocate for the library, education and cultural sectors, so tend to take a ‘minimalist’ view of copyright law. However we believe copyright literacy is inclusive and collaborative, so we welcome all approaches to copyright and copyright education. We therefore welcome guest blog posts representing a range of different views.

7) Anything else? If there’s anything not covered above, please get in touch with us! However, please don’t submit us unsolicited pieces for the blog. If you have an idea about writing a guest blog post then get in touch via our Contact Form first to discuss your idea with us.

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