When looking at options and channels to grow your content licensing revenue in K-12 education, be sure to examine the potential arrangement carefully. Here are some questions to ask when considering an authorization agreement to participate in a student assessment license.
Will you lose your autonomy? Do you lose the ability to review, accept, or deny each order? Do you lose the ability to set the fee? Use your established agreement, legal approved templates?
Does the agreement provide for regular visibility into usages? Will you receive your due revenue more than once or twice a year?
Are you and your assets protected properly? Does the agreement pass all liability back to you, the rightsholder, despite the lack of ability to vet requests?
Rightsholders can unknowingly lose control when signing an authorization agreement to participate in a student assessment license. Here’s how these arrangements broadly work. Once a publisher signs up, that publisher name is added to a list of participating publishers. This is how licensees are supposed to identify available licensable works. There’s no master list of individual works with rights availability. When a licensee selects material to use, they report it to the 
agency along with the number of students in a usage report once a year that gets reconciled against the advance the licensee is required to provide and pay for twice a year. Rightsholders receive a report and payment just once a year. So, if a licensee unwittingly selects and uses material the publisher doesn’t own or violates exclusivity or other contractual rights, it will likely be too late to do anything about it by the time the rightsholder receives the report revealing the use. Even if a rightsholder requests for the agency to check individual rights availability, it doesn’t often happen. And though unfair, the authorization agreement usually passes along all the liability to the rightsholder despite the lack of opportunity to review orders or non-transparent process.
Mosaiq’s mission is to help rightsholders grow their revenue in educational licensing without sacrificing review and control of their processes and risking unnecessary liability. CurationIQ hosts the material with rights metadata removing 
the guessing game on availability. CurationIQ is also a powerful resource for licensees to find content utilizing robust filters. Mosaiq works directly with rightsholders, allowing them to review and approve each and every offer, as well as continue to use their licensing templates. Mosaiq is seeking to change the landscape for content discovery and licensing in the education space. Authentic partnerships with both the licensors and licensees is key to achieving mutual success for all sides.
Please comment and share your experiences with authorization agreements or working with agencies. If you have any questions or would like to discuss authorization agreements and student license agreements in greater detail, please don’t hesitate to reach out.