The articles on owlcove are targeted at providing helpful and interesting information to students in a fun way. Some of them are designed to provoke thought and further discussion, whilst others are written to inform and entertain.
Through Think, we hope to provide a space for people passionate about writing to express themselves, develop their ideas, and connect with others with the same interests. If this is you, you are welcome to write with us.
All the articles on owlcove are written and published by people exactly like you. You don’t need prior experience or training. All you need to do is to be responsible for your own opinions.
To join our writing team, contact us or email your work to [email protected]. We’ll look through them, and suggest edits if needed. Don’t worry, you will always keep ownership of the work you show us.
Sharing principles
Hi there! Thanks for wanting to share your knowledge with the rest of the world. Before uploading, please read through our submission guidelines and help us make sure owlcove is a place for fun, free and fair learning.
- Respect copyrights and originality. Don’t pass off others’ work as your own. If your materials have stuff that’s copied wholesale from others, make sure you have obtained the permission of the creators themselves. You wouldn’t want someone else to re-upload something you shared and claim it as his own, would you? If you’re not sure whether something you have would infringe on any rules, you can find out more about copyrights and other intellectual property issues here.
- Credit the right people. Citing bibliographies and references doesn’t only make your work more reliable and trustworthy; it also makes it more valuable by directing people who want to read more to your sources. More value = more downloads + more recommends.
- Share only relevant things. While your grocery list or favourite song lyrics may be really interesting, Owlcove is a place for people to find useful notes and study materials. It would be really painful for fellow students to have to plough through loads of unrelated information to find what they want – they already have to do that in school. Keeping the library free of distracting material will make the library more useful for everyone and for you.
- Be responsible and considerate. Do not upload any offensive, obscene, misleading or questionable material. You are responsible for the things you share, and doing so could land you in trouble with both the site admins and the police.
- Tag your stuff appropriately. No one likes the feeling of clicking on a link to what was supposed to be a funny video and ending up being told that they are Never Gonna Be Let Down. This really lets them down. By naming your work appropriately and stating exactly what subjects and content it covers, you make sure that people searching for information get what they want. And if you give people what they want, they tend to give you what you want too.
- Remember, knowledge is something that should be open, respected and shared. By adhering to the above guidelines, you can do your part to keep it that way and encourage others to do the same. Let’s work together to keep the Library fun and useful for everyone.
Anyway, that’s all for the uploading guidelines. You are now ready to upload your first set of notes. Thanks for sharing!
-The owlcove team :)
Footnote: About Copyright Protection
All materials shared on owlcove will be protected under copyright by the Creative Commons License suite, unless they are inappropriate, or themselves infringements of copyright to begin with.
In normal copyright instances, all rights are automatically reserved the moment the work is created. This means that others will not be able to change or copy things from your file for both commercial and non-commercial uses unless they have obtained your consent.
However, reserving all rights would make it very difficult for people to make full use of your materials for their own learning. Hence, when you upload a file, it will by default be protected under the ‘Creative Commons By-ShareAlike-Non-Commercial’ license. We'll help you put this on your notes, so you don't need to worry about it.
This means that others will be allowed to edit and adapt your material, as long as they credit you and license their resulting work using the ‘CC-BY-SA-NC’ as well. Additionally, they can only be using it for non-commercial purposes.
This license was chosen by us because it’s the most suitable one for the Library. It gives everyone the ability to build upon each others’ work and thus build upon each others’ knowledge. At the same time, it offers adequate protection of intellectual property and effort.