Authorship, Ownership and Censorship

The evaluator’s role will almost certainly involve the production of written documents. This may simply be recording the comments and conclusions of others (the evaluator acting as “scribe” to a team review and evaluation activity) or it may be the critical analysis of an individual evaluator acting autonomously.
It is essential at the early stages of contracting with an evaluator to establish the authorship and ownership of evaluation products, their circulation and the rights of reply of groups and individuals and the ‘censorship’ rights of the contractor. Issues of copyright and publication rights, IPR and use of purpose-designed tools also need to be resolved.
In most cases, the evaluator is a paid sub-contractor and thus the evaluation reports become the property of the contractor along with the copyright to do with as they wish. Taking an extreme example, an evaluation report may be heavily critical of a project. The project staff, having taken delivery of the report, ‘own’ the report and can withhold publication, edit or censor parts of it. There is little the evaluator can do in this case but can ask that their name and the name of their organisation be removed. That is, they can properly deny authorship.
What they cannot do is stop parts of the text that they have provided being used, albeit custom and practice would expect these individual parts to acknowledge authorship. Conversely, whilst the copyright on any questionnaires and tools designed by the evaluator for the project and specified in the contract remain the property of the contractor, the Intellectual Property Rights can never be removed from the author i.e. you can always quote yourself! This is a complicated field and if it is an issue on a particular contract, specialist information should be sought in advance of the contract.
The examples given above are extreme cases and usually only result where there has been a serious breakdown in relationships. More typically, the evaluator will produce a draft report that will be circulated by the project staff for consultation before the final version is agreed.
A typical consultation would invite readers to comment on:

• Matters of fact; it may well be that particular details (dates, times, places etc) are inaccurate and can be corrected.
• Matters of opinion; either the evaluator will change their opinion in the light of new information and argument or will maintain their original stance. In the latter case it is probably useful to let the comment stand and qualify it by saying “in the opinion of the evaluators….however, this is disputed by  many  people / the majority of those consulted felt this  was not the case /  one person disagreed with this” etc.
• Errors of omission. The most frequently occurring response to consultation is that the report does not contain reference to a particular aspect of the project.

Ultimately this is for agreement between the evaluator and the contractor and is almost always as a result of word length rather than deliberate exclusion.
However, omissions may also be for other reasons:

• Confidentiality e.g. staffing issues
• Problems that have been dealt with satisfactorily and from which there are no further learning points
• Matters of a sensitive nature or which have a relevant audience more limited than the circulation of the document.

The important thing is to discuss authorship of documents and ownership of evaluation products, who has powers and rights of censorship before they become issues. In addition, it may be that problems in the area can be avoided by having multiple evaluation products. For example, it would be inappropriate for a document in the public domain to contain explicit references to the internal dynamic of the staff team nor would such specific information be relevant to others. However, it may be useful information to feedback verbally to the people involved or as a different document.
Questions covered in Handout 4 Consultation

• Who will write the document?
• Who will own the copyright on the document?
• Who has editorial control over the document?
• Who has the power of censorship on the documents?
• Are there any restrictions on the use of the material once the final evaluation product has been presented?