We would like to express our gratitude to the kind folks at Escola Das Gaivotas for hosting us, and to Teresa, Fatima, André, and Diogo from the CC Portugal team for being the best hosts ever!

What happens when you put 30 passionate commoners accustomed to meeting only online in a lovely conference venue in an historic city? Lots of talking, group updates, big plans being made, old and new issues being tackled, great projects presented, and new designs of collaboration schemes.

At the end of September, 30 participants from 15 different European Creative Commons teams came together for a meeting in Lisbon, Portugal. CC Representatives from the UK, France, Poland, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Ireland, Slovenia, Greece, Belarus, Ukraine, Austria, Belgium, and Romania joined the meeting, organized by CC Portugal.

From this meeting, we learned that the CC affiliate network is interested (and involved) in much more than just licenses. CC teams are vital in new emerging “commons” activities, the sharing economy, 3D printing, open agriculture, open business models, and copyright reform.

Some highlights of the meeting:

• The School of Rock(ing) Copyright, an information sharing bootcamp on copyright reform organized by Communia, with support from CC’s Awesome Fund. For a full report on this session, see Communia’s website. We all stand for creativity, innovation, access to knowledge, and development. Copyright laws can either boost or limit these goals, so we are actively involved with making progressive changes to copyright to benefit users, education, and the commons. Having some non-EU affiliates with us as well offered an interesting perspective on the importance of training and support on copyright reform in other regions and other languages than English.
• CC business models with a presentation of CC Portugal’s Toolkit for businesses, and an overview of CC’s Open Business Model project. Open business models about more than using the commons for gaining profit.

  

  Open business models are about allowing all actors gain a fair share (above and beyond monetary rewards) for their contribution to the commons. Exploring and supporting open business models can also work to tackle the related discrepancies that can possibly turn a flourishing commons into a closed, feudalistic environment. The use of CC can one aspect for creating open, regenerative, and distributed networks.

• The kick off for the CC Certificates project raises fascinating challenges for CC in terms of education and validation of information about CC. A certification mechanism will formalize many of our efforts to teach about open, which is a challenge for a network with such a grassroots ethos. The project has a dedicated website where you can check for updates.
• A ‘CC infrastructure’ session on what’s going on at tech and legal level. You can check the notes from this meeting here.
• We also discussed the Global Network Strategy and next steps for our European community, which we look forward to continuing to work on over the next months, particularly as we prepare for our Global Summit in April in Toronto.

We’ll keep you updated as we continue our work for CC Europe in support of the commons. In the meantime, if you want to join the discussion, you can find us on Slack!

PS If you are wondering about the marvelous artworks in the photos, they’re by Vhils.

The post CC Europe meetup in Lisbon appeared first on Creative Commons.

According to Arturo Rodolfo Sanchez, a member of the ATLAS community and outreach team, “The large hadron collider is running now at 13 TeV. This is an energy level never seen before in a collider.” This exciting development is built on the power of open science – at ATLAS, data sharing and an open, innovative approach to information collaboration has become a fundamental part of this important scientific community.

This year, ATLAS decided to release the data from 100 trillion proton-proton particles to the public under CC0, the first release of 8 TeV data. More than 3000 scientists from 174 countries work on ATLAS, and more are joining every day. At the CERN open data platform educational portal, scientists, educators, and science enthusiasts can access the work of thousands of scientists working together to hunt for the Higgs-Boson particle and other important scientific discoveries.

Sanchez’s vision of science is open, and he believes that CERN’s is as well – working with Creative Commons, he describes a new kind of research organization built with the power of community. Though the 7000 ton ATLAS detector in the large hadron collider lives “100 meters below a small Swiss village,” the data moves far beyond the confines of the institution, providing insights and experimentation to the entire world.

This interview was conducted with the assistance of Noam Prywes, a post-doctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Why is open data and open science important to CERN? Why have you chosen to use CC0 for this dataset in particular?

Open Data, open software and open hardware are very important for us! It is part of our policy in the ATLAS Collaboration and the other Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. This is important for us because we are a scientific community and our main goal is to look for answers as humankind, not as an institution. We are also funded by taxpayers – CERN as an organisation and facility, and the experiments like ATLAS (part of the LHC) use public sector funding.

Independently of the member country, most of them have as policy/law to publicly release any final result, publication, dataset, and conclusion that public funding research institutions generate. In ATLAS, we develop resources (datasets and tools) that can be used mainly for educational projects carrying out by ATLAS and not-ATLAS members. Of course, this is not a restriction! We don’t want to limit the use that a person (educator, scientific, artist, etc…) could have with the data.

There are a lot of people out there with many different ways of thinking, so who knows what can be possible or not possible with those resources? This is why we went for the CC0 license for the datasets released by ATLAS on its Open Data project. The same has been done by the CERN Open Data project. I can complement my answer by mentioning several projects from CERN or CERN groups:

• Root: A modular scientific software framework
• CERN Open Data project for the release of experiment data and resources
• ATLAS OpenData and educational resources, our platform!
• CERN Open Hardware Project
• Invenio and Indico: Very successful projects born at CERN: and
• Open Lab: Another training and educational project where public and private sector come together

What’s the relationship between your initiative and other open data and open access initiatives in scientific communities? How are you working together? Is there anything unique about your relationship to open access that’s different from other open science initiatives?

As you can see, the CERN community is keen on the involvement of a high number of people, countries, institutions and research fields involved. Therefore, any project that includes two or more groups working at CERN or in CERN-hosted experiments is already an international enterprise!

Let me give you the ATLAS example: we are an experiment with ~3000 members coming from more than 120 universities around the world. Many of them are senior professors in their home institutions. Thousands of students can be or are already involved in ATLAS educational, training or outreach activities. This leaves us with the possibility of having a professor in a North American university using public data to write some code to train her new master’s student. At the same time, an ATLAS college in a German university is running a complete laboratory course in particle physics using the ATLAS public data together with a combination of public software and custom code. Meanwhile, a group of Latin-American ATLAS members are presenting public seminars and running exercises for high school students using public apps and public ATLAS data.

Since CERN is so international, how do you choose how you release data and publish research? Is open access a more acute concern because of national boundaries? What about funding sources? Are there countries that demand open access as a precondition for money? Has that influenced scientists from different locales?

The way to release data is in a worldwide common framework: on a web platform, with a lot of files to create the best documentation possible.

This last step is in fact the most difficult one, so, we run local trainings as well, with different audiences in order to get feedback and repair the holes and make the web and user interfaces better every day.

The fact that CERN is a multinational organisation with so many funding governments and institutions consolidate the openness of the research and the resources products of those. Many legal aspects are taking into account and I am do not know all the details, but the spirit is to share and be as useful as possible.

CERN is in such an individual position in terms of the science it does, so what kind of innovative measures are you taking to publicize this science? How are you highlighting the work that scientists and communities are doing with the published data?

We have been working very hard in the communication side by using every possible media out there to communicate results, activities, tutorials, and even how physicists spend their time. This is done by the CERN community and included in each of the experiments now. Our presence in social media is strong (at least for a scientific community!) and more and more people are aware of what we do and why it is important. Students around the world come to visit CERN and the experiments, and some others visit the place virtually. In the case of the data, the challenge right now is to use the power of the media and the web in order to explain how to use it. Developing easy but still powerful user Interfaces is the key! With a lot of energy and ideas we are trying to reach more people every day, even with the limited resources that we have.

I am reaching the end with the beginning of this story – the ATLAS Open Data platform. In the outreach group we are learning and developing tools and protocols that help us disseminate the data publicly, trying to prove to ourselves and the members of the experiment that there is interest to use those datasets and resources by the international community.

Our aim is getting more data out there! We want to make that data and tools available for the world to see.

The post Making data and tools available for the world to see: Arturo Sanchez of CERN on why ATLAS uses CC0 data appeared first on Creative Commons.

To commemorate the event, NDU hosted Naeema Zarif, Creative Commons Regional Coordinator for the Arab World. Ms. Zarif met NDU President Fr. Walid Moussa, who expressed the importance of capitalizing on recent trends in open education to broaden access, foster innovation, and alleviate student textbook costs.

During the symposium, Dr. Fawzi Baroud, Assistant Vice President for Information Technology, described the history of  NDU’s involvement with open education beginning with his own participation in the U.S. State Department sponsored Open Book Project in 2014 and the continued collaboration with Creative Commons to create awareness and devise capacity building projects for an optimal OER culture within the university. He also traced the University’s future trajectory with regard to OER and the role it will play in advancing OER in Lebanon and the region. Ms. Zarif went on to speak about CC licenses in a panel titled “Creative Commons Licenses and the Future of Open Education in the Arab World.”

The symposium’s second day (titled “NDU Student Attitudes toward the Use of OER”) focused on the piloting of OER in a university-wide English course targeting close to 600 students in more than twenty sections across three campuses. Dr. Kamal Abouchedid, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, highlighted the integration of OER as a strategic initiative at NDU and as a means of fostering open education.

The design of the course was described by Dr. Sandra Doueiher, Assistant Professor and Coordinator of English. Joining the discussion from Denmark via Skype, Dr. Ena Hodzik spoke about the scholarship of OER, specifically about the issue of quality and utility in the integration of OER. Dr. Hodzik went on to explain that the student survey administered by NDU closely aligned with the major themes in the literature of OER.

Survey results were presented by Dr. George Abdelnour, Chair of the Department of English and Translation. The extensive survey sought student feedback on the use of OER based on general attitudes, effectiveness, quality, and learning outcomes of the resources used. By a 2 to 1 margin, he explained, students showed high levels of satisfaction and engagement with OER. The findings also showed a favorable inclination toward enrolling in courses using OER in the future.

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My name is Dr. Jane-Frances Obiageli Agbu. I am from Onitsha, a small but vibrant town in the Eastern part of Nigeria in West Africa. I work with the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). I was the Head of NOUN-OER unit from 2014 till July 2016. Currently, I am the Dean of Faculty of Health Sciences of NOUN, which gives me the opportunity to focus on OER-Health. I am also an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology.

Photo by Jane-Frances Agbu, CC BY.

It is natural to view anything that is ‘open’ and ‘freely available’ with a sort of hesitation or anxiety. It is also natural to presume these types of resources to be of less quality because of our contemporary instinct that almost everything should be paid for, and that the more these materials are hoarded, the pricier they will be. The open movement, with its initiatives around ‘Open Education’, ‘Open Access’, and ‘Open Educational Resources’, can make many people very uncomfortable.

I embraced the concept and practices of Open Education in 2006 when I joined the National Open University of Nigeria. Back then, I was a mother of three very young, and I needed to work close to home. NOUN was just five minutes away from my home. It was a perfect situation, and with very minimal knowledge about open education, I applied and got a job there. At the time, NOUN then was just three years old. However, they offered robust training for new entrants in the open education space, since the concept and practice was relatively new in Nigeria.

My friends and colleagues, who were so used to the conventional face-to-face mode of education, were disappointed with me. They asked me, ‘What is “open” about the open university?’ and said, “You should seek appointment in a ‘normal’ university in order to be respected and advance your career”. these comments were both troublesome and motivating. I wondered whether I made a mistake joining NOUN, but a chance encounter in an elevator with one of our students got me thinking. He simply asked, ‘Do you work here?’, and when I nodded my head, he said ‘thank you for giving me the opportunity to work and learn’. It was heartwarming, and 10 years later I am happily still an advocate of open education.

I became more involved in the Open Educational Resources movement in 2013. It was another chance encounter because the invitation to the workshop that introduced me to OER was initially meant for a senior Professor at my University, but he was busy and I was asked to attend. The workshop took place in Abuja, Nigeria and was organized by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) in collaboration with UNESCO and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). There, I met Abel Caine of UNESCO and Alex Gakuru of Creative Commons. Alex said something that really stuck with me: “We are Africans, we live communal lives, we cook together, we work together. It is in us to share, so why are we not sharing knowledge?” I was incredibly captivated with this statement, and I wrote a long proposal to my institution on the need to embrace OER. A year and half later, I was asked to champion OER within NOUN. With support from UNESCO, we were able to organize an OER workshop to educate policy makers, university faculty, and course content developers. In December 2015 we shared our experiences with the Federal government of Nigeria.

You’ll see that my journey toward embracing open education and Open Educational Resources has not been a straightforward one, but it is a life that leaves me with smiles and appreciation. Mysteriously, it appears that some angels have crossed my path in this journey and further helped me to understand the beauty of opening up knowledge for common good.

While pondering on the palpable anxiety for the ‘open’ movement, let me share with you a bit more of my thinking:

• Naturally, with whatever knowledge we have, we want to be the “sage on the stage rather than a guide on the side”. This famous statement from Allison King brings back floods of memories for me. I can still visualize my former professors speaking eloquently in class, filling students with respect and awe. I felt anxious and wondered if I could ever get to be as knowledgeable as my professors. They were knowledge personified. But for me, open education has demystified this sort of reverence toward dissemination of knowledge. Open Educational Resources—with its five Rs (reuse, remix, repurpose, revise, retain) and the flexible license options of Creative Commons—has humanized and democratized teaching and learning. Surely there are some that still believe in sole ownership of knowledge. Those people will continue to feel threatened by the ‘open movement’, but we’ve seen the incredible opportunities of open education, and we’ll continue on our path.
• Some are also hesitant to share knowledge because of fear of scrutiny. This of course is a natural instinct (no one likes to be criticised), but overcoming this shows that you view criticism as an avenue of learning and improvement. I think we will come to see that the costs of being ‘closed’ are much greater than the costs of being ‘open’, and that in the long run ‘open’ will be more personally gratifying, and help the most people.
• Also, is it possible that this initial anxiety toward being more open is triggered by the desire for conformity? It is a lot easier to move with the popular opinion, while advocates of OER and other open initiatives are still in the minority. But we must realize that it takes courage to walk with the less-traveled crowd. And we will realize that we are not alone, and that there is an increasing support network of educators, students, and advocates to rely on and collaborate with.

Photo by Jane-Frances Agbu, CC BY.

In March 2016, I was selected as one of the participants for Institute of Open Leadership (IOL2). I met other beautiful individuals that share a similar vision for ‘open’. In a lush garden up high in mountains of Cape Town, we shared our experiences, our projects, and open policy plans. The beauty remains with me as we continue to receive guidance from our mentors and share information amongst the IOL2 fellows.

IOL2 Fellows + Mentors, by Cable Green , CC BY 2.0

Here are some useful links related to my work:

• The Best of Two Open Worlds at the National Open University of Nigeria
• Embracing the Philosophy of Open Educational Resources
• “It upholds the dignity of mankind”: The power of OER in West Africa
• OER for Teachers video

The post Pondering the Future of Open Education in Nigeria appeared first on Creative Commons.

We’ve submitted a proposal to get the Creative Commons logo, license, and public domain icons into Unicode (more specifically, the Universal Coded Character Set or UCS). Unicode is the industry standard for encoding characters into text, which means that virtually all text-based editors, or tools with text-based editors, enable those characters and symbols that have been encoded into the standard. Examples of encoded characters range from ancient Greek letters to the current day ©, @, and universal ♲ symbols.

We’re excited about our proposal for several reasons: if encoded, creators will easily be able to mark their CC-licensed works with icons in text; users will be able to provide attribution for CC-licensed works they use with icons; and, if nothing else, in developing the proposal we became better aware of the ubiquitous use of our icons across a diversity of media, contexts, and domains. (Thanks for your contributions of CC-marked physical media on Twitter!)

We wanted to share the proposal (pdf) to get your thoughts as our community, especially if we missed any examples of use you think we should have included for future iterations. We are still planning on submitting a separate proposal for Creative Commons Emoji – adding CC icons to Emoji would put icon attribution in the hands of everyone with mobile devices – so your feedback is valuable. More importantly, we would still like to know: how do you currently indicate the CC license on a work without Unicode? How would you like to be able to indicate the license on a work? See the form below to submit a quick response to these questions.

Lastly, you’ll note in the proposal that the CC logo and icons are governed by a trademark policy, while most unicode characters are not. We address this point directly (we don’t think encoding CC icons in Unicode would jeopardize our trademarks or that having a trademark policy clarifying their usage undercuts the purpose of having the icons encoded), but we also welcome your questions and thoughts.

The post Our proposal to get the CC logo and icons into Unicode appeared first on Creative Commons.

It’s Open Access Week 2016. Open Access Week is an annual week-long event that highlights the importance of sharing scientific and scholarly research and data. The goal is to educate people on the benefits of open publishing, advocate for changes to policy and practice, and build a community to collaborate on these issues. This year’s theme is open in action.

Today marks the conclusion of another productive, informative Open Access Week. There were dozens of in-person workshops, online webinars, blog posts, and other actions from institutions and individuals all over the world aiming to educate and advocate for a more open system of producing and sharing research.

On Monday we took a look at the increasing drumbeat around improving access to publicly funded research. On Tuesday we published an interview with Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust, exploring the perspective of philanthropy in supporting open access publishing. Wednesday we launched a beta version of our Termination of Transfer Tool, a project that empowers authors to learn about whether and when they can regain rights from publishers in order to share their works on an open access basis. We also published an interview with scientist and advocate Erin McKiernan about her work for open science. On Thursday we hosted a Twitter chat with members of the library and scientific community to talk about some of the problems with the current scholarly publishing system, and what we can do about it.

It’s clear that our work and advocacy in open access can’t end today if we expect positive change in support of improved access to scientific and scholarly research.

As Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley wrote in WIRED:

If it wasn’t so well-established, the traditional model of academic publishing would be considered scandalous. Every year, hundreds of billions in research and data are funded, in whole or in part, with public dollars. We do this because we believe that knowledge is for the public good, but the public gets very little access to the fruits of its investment.

It’s a shame that our movement needs to argue with policymakers that the public should get access to research that it pays for. It’s a shame that instead of experimenting with an “open by default” approach to sharing scientific information, in much of policy and practice the status quo remains closed.

The work of open access needs to keep in clear view the ultimate goals of science and scholarship—a fundamental search for knowledge—that is now supercharged for sharing and collaboration to solve the world’s toughest scientific and social problems.

But open access is not just about working to flip the default from closed to open.

There are increasing threats to access to information, education, and freedom of expression. Just last week in Uruguay, 14 people were convicted and sentenced to prison for the crime of making copies of educational resources for noncommercial use. In Colombia, student Diego Gomez is being prosecuted for the crime of sharing a research paper online. A copyright “reform” proposal has been introduced by the European Commission, but many of its provisions do little to improve the rights of users and the public. Instead, much of the proposal reinforces protectionist measures for incumbent rights holders, while providing only limited benefits for researchers, teachers, internet users, and consumers.

The open access movement should cooperate and collaborate with related communities of action, including the important work to rebalance the underlying systems of copyright to benefit creativity, innovation, and access to knowledge.

We’d like to thank SPARC for leading this week’s activities, Authors Alliance for their partnership on the Termination of Transfer tool, and the countless libraries, universities, advocacy organizations, and individuals who participated in Open Access Week.

The post ‘Open In Action’ Requires Continuity and Solidarity with Fundamental Copyright Reform appeared first on Creative Commons.

According to Uruguayan copyright law 9.739, all copying of works under copyright—even if there is no profit-seeking motive—are criminal offenses. Therefore, anyone who makes copies for study or to access culture can be indicted with a single complaint.

Following the copy shop raid in 2013, the Uruguayan Student Federation presented a draft bill on educational and library exceptions to copyright. The proposed text would remove the criminal penalties for infringements that are not commercial in nature. The bill has been preliminary approved by the Parliament, but still needs to be finalized. As expected, collecting societies and the Uruguay Publishers Association oppose the bill, arguing that copyright exceptions will destroy creators.

Creative Commons Uruguay, along with a large group of social organizations, are urging legislators to give early approval to the copyright reform bill, before more people like students, librarians, and internet users are convicted of making non-commercial copies of educational resources.

Jorge Gemetto is co-director of Ártica and team member of Creative Commons Uruguay. 

The post In Uruguay, 14 people convicted for making copies of educational resources appeared first on Creative Commons.

It’s Open Access Week 2016. Open Access Week is an annual week-long event that highlights the importance of sharing scientific and scholarly research and data. The goal is to educate people on the benefits of open publishing, advocate for changes to policy and practice, and build a community to collaborate on these issues. This year’s theme is open in action.

Scientist Erin McKiernan practices Open Science with a capital “O.” She is a researcher, an advocate for scientific diversity, and an educator on a mission to make science more inclusive and supportive. Erin’s work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Computational Neuroscience, and she has written book chapters and articles for a variety of media, including Scientific American and The Guardian. Her Shuttleworth Foundation sponsored project “Why Open Research?” is a lighthearted, educational take on the importance of open access scientific research. Erin lives and works in Mexico, where she is a professor in the Department of Physics, Biomedical Physics Program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

You are an international researcher who advocates for open science, open data, and other open systems. What initially interested you about working in research and education outside of the mainstream academic publishing climate? What drives you to continue doing this work?

I first became interested in open access while working as an adjunct professor at the University of Puerto Rico. I worked at one of the smaller campuses and we had limited access to the scientific literature. Struggling to access articles on a daily basis really puts the problem in perspective. Even more frustrating was watching my students struggle to access the literature they needed for their classes and research projects. I saw how it hindered their learning. Around the same time, I joined Twitter and began to connect with people in the open advocacy space. Through reading their tweets and blogs, I learned more about open access and open science in general, and found a very supportive community.

For the last four years, I have worked as an educator and researcher in Mexico, where we have similar problems with a lack of access to scientific information as those I saw while working in Puerto Rico. While I’m lucky to work now at a large public institution with relatively good access to the scientific literature, many other scientists and students in Mexico struggle every day to access the information they need. This, along with a belief that increasing transparency makes for better science, is what drives me to continue my open advocacy work.

The theme of this year’s Open Access week is “Open in Action.” How do you put “open in action?” How can other scientists and researchers put “open in action” through their research, teaching, and educational activities?

In 2014, I publicly pledged to publish my work only in open access journals. Since then, I have expanded this pledge and have committed to share not only my published articles but also my preprints, code, data, and laboratory notebooks when possible. You can find my full pledge here.

I understand not all researchers are comfortable with this level of sharing, especially at first, but I think all researchers can commit to simple actions. For example, you can upload author versions of your published articles to open repositories to ensure all your work is accessible regardless of the venue in which it was originally published. Around 80% of journals currently allow this type of self-archiving. Another simple action educators and researchers can take is to share their slide decks from classes or seminars on open platforms like Figshare. As researchers take these simple steps and start to see the benefits, I hope they’ll be encouraged to take even bigger steps (like data sharing) in the future.

What can open advocates do to begin to fix scholarly publishing?  

One of the best things advocates can do is lead by example. If you are a researcher and believe in the importance of open research, then share your articles, code, data, and tell people about your choices and successes. As people see you sharing and being successful, it will inspire them to do the same.

Another thing advocates can do is help educate their students and colleagues. Ask your colleagues where they plan to publish and why they chose that venue. Tell them about open publishing options in their field. Do this respectfully — the idea is not to preach or push, but rather to give them options. Many researchers are happy to explore new, more open venues, but simply aren’t aware of the wide variety of platforms that exist for sharing their work.

Finally, if you sit on employment, grant review, or promotion and tenure committees, speak out about how the current emphasis on journal-level metrics, like impact factor, is hurting researchers and not always rewarding the best science. Encourage these committees to look at article-level metrics instead, and to value the importance of open publishing and science communication.

Your project “Why Open Research” provides a long list of reasons why open publishing is good for researchers, their career, and the future of science. What are the some of the benefits you’ve seen personally from your work in open?

Yes, I built Why Open Research? as a fun and visual way to show researchers the benefits to them of sharing their work. In addition, together with an excellent group of collaborators in the open advocacy and research space, I also recently published an article in the journal eLife called “How open science helps researchers succeed.”

I would say the biggest way in which I’ve benefitted from openly sharing my work is increased visibility. I’ve been able to reach a larger audience that I would have if I published only in closed-access journals. People have reached out to me through my blog and Twitter to discuss my work, and even talk about potential collaborations. This increased visibility is particularly important for researchers in the early stages of their career, who are looking to build a name for themselves. I think open research has helped me do that. Another way I’ve benefitted is receiving feedback. I’ve put preprints out and received detailed feedback from others in the field that helped me improve my manuscripts before journal submission. In my view, the more eyes on my work before final publication, the better. Open platforms have helped me get more eyes on my work.

How can other researchers be better advocates for open science and open data? How can the scientific community come together to support each other in this worthy goal?

Again, it’s important to start with your little corner of the world. Begin by sharing your own work and speaking to your colleagues about your choices. Establish a set of best practices for managing and sharing data from your lab, use electronic notebooks that can be easily shared, tweet and blog about your research. Most importantly, teach your students to do the same. In this way, we ensure that the next generation of researchers sees open research practices as the default way of doing science rather than the exception to the rule.

The scientific community as a whole is diverse. We have people working all over the world, and under very different conditions. We have to be aware of these different conditions (limited or no access to high-speed internet, limited financial resources for research, institutions with varying levels of infrastructure), and think about how some of the solutions we propose for promoting open science and open data may be affected by these factors.

It is important that researchers from these countries and institutions be given a chance to voice their specific concerns when we’re discussing how to move forward. Some of the most relevant and innovative solutions for improving science and science communication are likely to come from developing countries.

The open advocacy space is perhaps even more diverse, with not only researchers at a variety of institutions, but also librarians, scholarly communication experts, policy makers, publishers, etc. I think the most important thing we can do is keep talking, and create more spaces (conferences, conference calls, community events) where we can overlap and talk about the unique challenges facing each of our communities.

The post Supporting a diverse community of scientists: How Erin McKiernan puts “Open in Action” appeared first on Creative Commons.

It’s Open Access Week 2016. Open Access Week is an annual week-long event that highlights the importance of sharing scientific and scholarly research and data. The goal is to educate people on the benefits of open publishing, advocate for changes to policy and practice, and build a community to collaborate on these issues. This year’s theme is open in action.

In keeping with this year’s Open Access theme “Open in Action”, Creative Commons and Authors Alliance are pleased to announce a new tool that empowers authors to learn about whether and when they have the right to terminate licensing arrangements they have made with publishers that prevent them from sharing their works openly.  All authors who transfer copyright under U.S. law have this right under certain circumstances. While many of these transfer agreements last “for the life of copyright” (which in the United States means seventy years after the author dies!), the law takes into account that these terms can ultimately be unfair to authors and artists, and so provides a mechanism for regaining those rights.

The tool, dubbed the Termination of Transfer Tool, is in beta form and now available for public feedback.

One early analysis estimates that control over more than 2.5 million works may be reclaimed by authors in the United States, but this is just a starting point. Anyone, including artists, photographers, scholars and scientists, can use this new tool to discover whether they have the right to take back rights they previously assigned away. While this tool is currently U.S.-based only, CC plans to internationalize it for use worldwide. Author Sidonie Smith of University of Michigan tested the tool with us just prior to its release. Check out our video demo to learn more. Feel free to test the tool, and contribute feedback via our public discussion forum. We’ll be taking feedback for the next month or so and hope to launch the final version of the tool in early December.

This is just one of several new tools that Creative Commons will be launching in the next two years in support of authors and other creators who want to retain and regain control of their copyright. Watch this space for more information as we roll out betas of our reinvigorated Scholars Copyright Addendum Engine (SCAE) and a new tool still in very early development that will allow time-based movement to more freedoms automatically. All three of these tools will be internationalized in collaboration with our affiliates around the world, and are being developed in part through generous funding by the Arcadia Fund.

Watch this space for more information. We look forward to receiving your feedback on this exciting new tool.

Happy Open Access week!

The post Regain Control Of Your Work — Announcing the Termination of Transfer Tool (beta) appeared first on Creative Commons.

It’s Open Access Week 2016. Open Access Week is an annual week-long event that highlights the importance of sharing scientific and scholarly research and data. Its goal is to educate people on the benefits of open publishing, advocate for changes to policy and practice, and build a community to collaborate on these issues. This year’s theme is open in action. Today we are exploring open access policy within philanthropy by interviewing Robert Kiley from the Wellcome Trust. From brokering the Bermuda Principles for immediate sharing of DNA sequence data in 1996 to being the first funder to mandate open access to our funded publication in 2005, Wellcome has been at the forefront of open research for over two decades.

CC: Can you describe the Wellcome Trust and your role within the organisation?

RK: Wellcome exists to improve health for everyone by helping great ideas to thrive. We’re a global charitable foundation, both politically and financially independent. We support scientists and researchers, take on big problems, fuel imaginations, and spark debate.

I’m currently on secondment from the Wellcome Library and am the Development Lead for Open Research. In this role I’m responsible for developing a strategy for the Wellcome Trust which will set out what we could do to move the needle in making research outputs findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable – the FAIR principles.

The Wellcome Trust has had an open access policy in place for several years now, and other philanthropic grantmakers such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Ford Foundation have adopted similar policies that require open licensing for the outputs of grant funding. Can you describe the motivation behind the adoption of a CC BY open access policy for Wellcome funded research?

We believe that the full research and economic benefit of published content will only be realised when there are no restrictions on access to, and re-use of, this information.

When we first setup our open access policy in 2005, we simply required authors to agree that articles would be made available online. We didn’t specify an open license that needed to be used. Over time, we began to understand that requiring an open license would help realise the full benefits of the research. From a practical perspective, mandating an open license helps us communicate the access and re-use rights, thus making it easier for downstream users to understand how they can use it. We’d also seen that some of our research had been published on a commercial website and had been subject to a takedown from the rightsholder. By adopting an open licensing policy we could make sure that the research funded by Wellcome is widely available without these troubles.

Related to this, open licensing allows for our research to be share beyond the traditional publication channels, and can help reach audiences where they are. So, for example, an article studying the effects of, say, breastfeeding, published under open access licence, can be posted on other platforms like Facebook or Mumsnet in order to reach the communities who get their information there. This is made possible with an open license like CC BY.

Equally, openly licensed content can be translated without first seeking permission from the rights holder.  Again, this helps to increase the reach (and potential impact) of the research we fund.  

Following on from that question, do you have thoughts on the intersection of open policy adoption between private funders like Wellcome and public research funding bodies? Do you see learnings or best practices that could be exchanged between these various funders, and whether there are particular considerations that should to be addressed so that the research that comes out of each funding stream is maximally useful for those that need it?

In some ways it might be easier for private organisations like Wellcome and Gates to adopt progressive open access policies. But from the government perspective the argument for open access is clear. And in the UK, the CC BY requirement applies to all research funded through the Research Councils UK (RCUK) when an APC is levied.

The government wants taxpayer-funded research to be openly reusable. It makes good economic sense, and can drive innovation and promote access to knowledge.

From CC’s point of view, we know that open licensing is only one aspect of a successful open access policy implementation, and that there are many other policy considerations and practicalities that need to be aligned. These include providing education and guidance for authors on publishing and licensing options, repository and deposit requirements, attaching metadata to promote search and discovery, data management, and policy compliance. Wellcome’s recent communication regarding publisher requirements seems to reflect a similar need for a holistic approach for OA policy implementation. Can you explain a bit more about these requirements, and why Wellcome decided to adopt them?

We make our Open Access funding available to institutions as block grants, and every year those institutions report back to us information on the outputs of that funding. We analyse the data, so we can determine how much an average APC charge was, and where the research was published. We’re also able to ascertain whether the institutions are following the requirements attached to the funding, for example whether an article was made available through in the relevant repository (Europe PMC), whether the appropriate license was used, etc.

Our analysis showed that in a number of cases where Wellcome was paying the fees, we weren’t getting what we paid for.  The the 2014-15 analysis showed that  around 30% of the papers were not fully compliant with our open access policy requirements. As a result, we recently created a set of publisher requirements, which makes explicit the things we expect from publishers when Wellcome pays an APC. For example, publishers must commit to the ongoing responsibility of keeping the articles up-to-date, including noting corrections, substantial revisions, license changes, and retractions.

There are huge opportunities—and many challenges—regarding the transformation of scholarly communications in service of improving access to research that could help solve global health problems. Is there a particular project or policy aspect that Wellcome is most interested in pursuing related to this objective?

We recently launched Wellcome Open Research, a platform for our grantees to rapidly publish any output from their research. This includes everything from typical research articles and data sets to case reports, notes, protocols, and even negative results. The platform is built on the F1000Research publishing model, which works on a post-publication peer review system.

Articles are submitted to the platform and checked to verify authorship and pass other applicable considerations, such as ethics clearance, plagiarism detection and data availability. Once it’s passed these minimal checks, the article is formally published and is assigned a citation and DOI. Publication will typically happen within 5-7 days. After that, peer review begins. Everything is done in public, and the outputs are openly licensed—usually CC BY for articles, and CC0 for data.

Wellcome is also supporting the work of ASAPbio (and others) to encourage the sharing of preprints in the life and biological sciences.  We believe that sharing of preprints provides researchers with a fast way to disseminate their work, establish priority of their discoveries, and obtain feedback. They also offer a more current understanding of an investigator’s work.

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