The team here at Creative Commons was delighted to publicly release our new organizational strategy on January 22, after almost a year of intensive team, community, and board consultations. For the next several years, our focus will be to:

• Strengthen the open infrastructure of sharing
• Defend and advocate for a thriving creative commons
• Center community

These goals are high level, as they tend to be when packaged up as part of a multi-year strategy. These goals should also feel familiar, for an organization whose mission it is to empower individuals and communities around the world through technical, legal, and policy solutions that enable the sharing of education, culture, and science in the public interest. But there are important nuances included in these goals and subsequent short-, medium-, and long-term objectives that point to intentional and meaningful shifts in the ways we operate to meet this moment. 

Of course the legal layer of the open infrastructure—the CC licenses and legal tools themselves—must be strengthened. But also, new sharing frameworks must be explored for changing times. 

Of course we must ensure the ongoing survival of the commons. But strategies need to evolve from solely being a sensible argument around opening up access to information. We know that greater access facilitates advances in education, in the scientific arena, and in our ability to understand and appreciate the diversity of cultural heritage that exists. However, those who previously saw the obvious benefits to sharing may now be hesitant, uncertain about how their works will be used or contextualized, through advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning. 

Finally, one might think that centering community goes without saying, but actually, it doesn’t. As an organization that has only achieved what it has because of a strong community of advocates bringing their expertise and passion to bear, we know we cannot continue to impact the social norms and legal frameworks of sharing without full participation.

So what does all of this mean for our work today, and throughout this year? Since we are currently operating in the age of AI, where all content also functions as data, we are focusing our work in two key areas:

1. Data governance, shaped by legal and norms-based infrastructure to facilitate sharing.
2. Sustaining open licensing in the age of AI, as high value contributions to the commons at scale that must be sustained through reciprocity.

This focus is guided by CC’s core principle: ideas and facts should not be commodified. As we reimagine sharing in the age of AI, we also draw on our history which reminds us to resist the reflex to expand copyright. Instead, we believe developing new norms, as part of a healthy data governance framework that prioritizes sharing in the age of AI, is the best approach to meeting our mission.  

Data Governance

Our friends at Open Future define data governance as “how rules for data use are created and enforced. This includes laws, standards, and social norms that guide what people can and can’t do with data. Good governance ensures fair and responsible data sharing.”

CC plays a unique role within data governance across the open internet. The CC licenses provide a form of legal and social norms guidance that has facilitated sharing on the internet for the last 25 years. We think of CC’s role within data governance as providing critical infrastructure that enables community-driven, fair, and responsible data sharing. The challenge is that what is considered fair and responsible data sharing is not static; it evolves based on context. And while this has always been true, AI has brought issues of fairness, transparency, trust, accountability, and more to the forefront for CC and for our many collaborators and colleagues who are committed to human-centered approaches to data governance. 

In 2025, we need to continue to explain how the CC licenses interact with AI training, and champion preference signals as a way to advance the data governance we need to meet this moment. You’ve heard from us on this subject in the past, and there is much more to come as we find partners to pilot this work with in the coming months. Policy and legal environments will also continue to play a significant role in both driving and influencing the data governance landscape of the future. CC’s role in advocating for balanced copyright and policies that drive access to knowledge, especially as new legislation, particularly around AI, is passed and implemented, is instrumental in representing civil society and advocating on behalf of the public interest.

Sustaining Open Licensing in the Age of AI

The use of the CC licenses has resulted in billions of items being released openly. Today, these items have also become parts of AI training sets—this is a significant shift that is influencing the norms around open licensing. Our priority is increasing sustainable sharing and access, but we now must consider “what about AI?”. We believe that openly licensed collections of content, which act as high-value contributions to the commons, must continue to be prioritized. 

However, many creators (artists, researchers, educators, and everyone in between) are understandably concerned about their contributions to the commons being reduced to small pieces of data within huge datasets where they lose agency over how their works are being used. We believe that the antidote to this is reciprocity. We believe it is time for the open movement to ask for something in return when there is disproportionate benefit from use of open datasets. We aim to do this by developing relationships with AI model builders on behalf of those who contribute to the commons, ensuring that training datasets remain collectively owned, sustain the commons, and that data governance principles are respected.

We need more open educational, cultural, scientific, and research data to allow more rapid scientific discovery and collaboration. Sharing must continue in the age of AI and we are committed to supporting open licensing at scale, taking the context of AI into consideration. 

There are new and layered complexities in the open sharing world, and we’re excited and determined to help clarify and address these challenges. We’d like to see open sharing grow as a collective strategy  to advance the public interest. In 2025 (and beyond, I’m sure), we will be finding ways to facilitate agency for the movement and facilitating even more sharing and access, while ensuring that the commons remain resilient and sustainable.

If you’d like to support this work, consider joining the Creative Commons Open Infrastructure Circle. Our most dedicated supporters ensure that every day we can show up and do the valuable work of preserving and growing the global commons of knowledge and culture from which we all benefit.

The post From Strategy to Action: Focus Areas for 2025 appeared first on Creative Commons.

“Volga River. Caspian Sea (7-03-2023)” by Miguel Masegosa is licensed via CC BY 2.0 and contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2023 processed by Sentinel Hub.

At CC we believe that to solve big problems, the knowledge and culture about those problems needs to be open and freely accessible. In line with our Open Climate Campaign, which focuses on opening up climate research, we recently launched the Open Climate Data project, to facilitate better sharing of climate data on a global scale. Making climate data more open and easily accessible is a crucial step towards addressing the climate crisis.

We started this project by asking a fundamental question: “What climate data exists, and what can I do with it?” To reach an answer, we conducted a landscape analysis to better understand the permissible uses of existing large climate data sets. We surveyed a range of organizations that provide climate data on behalf of national, intergovernmental and/or global populations and are both publishers and sources of climate data. This approach enabled us to assess the current status of major sources of climate data and propose practical ways in which it can be shared more effectively. We hope this initial analysis provides clarity to researchers, policymakers, educators, civil society organizations and advocates.

Read our Landscape Analysis report to learn more about how we analyzed large climate data sources, in accordance with the FAIR data principles: findability, accessibility, technical interoperability, and reusability (as dictated by licensing terms).

As the primary aim of the Open Climate Data project is to facilitate better sharing of climate data, we analyzed a range of data-sharing approaches from multiple sources including: US government, global NGOs, regional international governments, European governments, and global intergovernmental alliances.

Landscape Data Sources

U.S. Government

• Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Data Center (ARM)
• Envirofacts
• Environmental System Science Data Infrastructure for a Virtual Ecosystem (ESS-DIVE)
• National Centers for Environmental Information at NOAA
• NASA Earth Science Data Systems

Global NGOs

• GEOSS Portal
• International Energy Agency
• Sensor.Community
• The World Bank Group Climate Change Knowledge Portal
• WRI Data

Regional International Governments

• 3CN Climate Database: Latin America
• Asia-Pacific Data-Research Center (APDRC): Asia
• Chinese Academy of Science Earth: China
• IGAD Climate Predictions and Applications Centre: Africa

European Governments

• Atmosphere Data Store (ADS)
• CEDA Archive
• Climate Data Store
• European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative
• Met Office

Global Intergovernmental Alliances

• European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)
• European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT)
• The Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. Geographic Network
• International Renewable Energy Agency
• OECD Data
• UN Environment Programme Global Resource Information Database (GRID) – Geneva

FAIR Data Principles

Given the diverse range of climate data sponsors, publishers, and sources from around the world, we found a wide variety of methods for accessing climate data. Our goal was to understand how their climate data can be accessed in accordance with the FAIR data principles: findability, accessibility, technical interoperability, and reusability (as dictated by licensing terms). We examined how these climate data providers share their data today, and established a baseline of open climate data information by assessing each of these variables.

This project is dedicated to improving the sharing of climate data, and we place great importance on pursuing this goal collaboratively with the diverse range of stakeholders involved in addressing climate change. Our next step is to establish a dedicated working group of expert practitioners and representatives from regional and global climate data publishers and data source entities, and collectively, to develop a community sharing standard for open climate data. We hope to offer guidance to stewards of large open climate datasets and the broader climate data community — including those not involved in the original data creation — on best practices for sharing climate data in standardized ways that maximize accessibility, reuse and sharing.

We invite you to join us in our ongoing journey of learning and collaboration as we develop policies and practices to open up data for the advancement of climate research and innovation. Stay connected with us by emailing openclimatedata@creativecommons.org and subscribing to our newsletter.

The post Surveying the Open Climate Data Landscape appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today, Creative Commons (CC) is excited to announce one million US dollars in new programmatic support from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation (PJMF) to help open large climate datasets. The twelve-month grant will enable CC to conduct key climate data landscape analyses and expand our work, bringing people together to create policy and practices to open data that advances climate research and innovation.

“We are delighted to have been awarded this new programmatic support to help us play our part in solving one of humanity’s greatest challenges, the climate crisis,” said Catherine Stihler, CC CEO. “By opening up large datasets, we open endless possibilities to further knowledge and greater understanding of the causes and solutions to our climate crisis.”

“By opening up large datasets, we open endless possibilities to further knowledge and greater understanding of the causes and solutions to our climate crisis.”

The work funded by PJMF will complement activities already underway with CC and our partners in the Open Climate Campaign, a multi-year project to promote open access to research to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity.

“Providing scale, accuracy, and granularity, data assets like the ones this partnership makes possible will serve as transformational tools in achieving climate goals and protecting our planet and community,” said Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. “Our work with Creative Commons advances and accelerates the creation of such open data sets and leverages the best knowledge we have today to create a better future for tomorrow.”

“Providing scale, accuracy, and granularity, data assets like the ones this partnership makes possible will serve as transformational tools in achieving climate goals and protecting our planet and community.”

“We are so pleased to have our climate work further supported by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation,” said Dr. Cable Green, CC Director of Open Knowledge. “Opening large climate datasets is essential to our strategy to support better sharing, which includes helping scientists share all the components of their research – including their data – to support reproducibility and further inquiry.”

CC is recruiting for a new person to join our team, working on opening large climate datasets. Do you want to help with this work? Please see this job opportunity: Open Climate Data Manager.

The post Patrick J. McGovern Foundation Funds New CC Initiative to Open Large Climate Datasets appeared first on Creative Commons.

As the year comes to a close, we’re spotlighting Creative Commons’ public policy work, recapping what we’ve done and looking ahead to the new year. In this edition, we turn to our work on better sharing of data.

“NYTimes: Regulation and Innovation since 1981 (Radial)” by Jer Thorp is licensed via CC BY 2.0; here modified by cropping.

The sharing of open data can be incredibly beneficial to society: facilitating enhanced scientific collaboration and reproducibility, increasing government and corporate transparency, and speeding the discovery and understanding of solutions to planetary and societal needs. Creative Commons has long championed open data, including in our recent launch of our Open Climate Campaign and our collaboration with partners to launch The Movement for a Better Internet.

Along with promoting open data, we also believe that other ways to share data better can help build the commons and support our mission of better sharing: sharing that is inclusive, just and equitable — where everyone has wide opportunity to access data and to contribute their own data as they see fit. Of course, not all sharing of data is beneficial; for instance, collection and use of one’s personal data can undermine a person’s choice, autonomy, and fundamental rights and raise real concerns. At the same time, there are other ways to share data beyond merely open data — such as by giving individuals control over sharing of their own data — that hold the potential for meaningful benefits.

Creative Commons’ Approach to Data & Public Policy

Creative Commons’ advocacy on data sharing centers around the following key areas:

Neither copyright nor related or sui generis rights should be used to raise barriers to the reuse and sharing of data. Data — that is, facts about subjects — has not traditionally been protected by intellectual property laws, in part, because of the negative consequences of granting legal monopolies over facts. Protecting facts with ownership rights locks up truths about the world, making the basic building blocks of creativity and innovation unavailable for anyone else to use other than their rightsholders, potentially for decades.

People should be able to use, reuse, and share the data they generate when engaging with digital services. Public policy should enable data portability for the data people generate, particularly in contexts of dominant service providers that effectively act as gatekeepers in a market. Enabling portability can foster innovation in the marketplace by preventing users from being locked-in to particular services; unlock more value from the data by allowing others to use and build upon it; and can lead to creative new insights that may have been invisible to the initial data holder.

Interoperability can help ensure individuals can access and share their data. While regulations may encourage or require data sharing, such sharing may be impossible or impractical because of differing data standards. Public policy can play an important role by facilitating or mandating interoperability. To that end, policy can support the development of clear, agreed-upon standards by which data can be shared across services.

The public sector has a critical role to play in facilitating data uses for public purposes. Data collected by public bodies is a public asset, and, except where it’s subject to valid limitations (like privacy and security interests), should be made freely available for everyone to use, reuse, build upon, and share without restrictions. Similarly, databases and datasets that are produced using public funds should be open to the public, even if they were created by third parties. Moreover, public sector entities have a crucial role to play in unlocking access to business’ data in order to serve public purposes. Policy can empower the public sector to help build and steward a broader data commons, where both private sector and public bodies’ data can be accessed and used to public ends, and can encourage more collaboration between the public and private sectors regarding the use and sharing of data.

CC’s Engagement on Data & Public Policy in 2022

• Engaging on data regulation in the EU: This year, the European Commission introduced the Data Act, as part of its broader data governance strategy. The Data Act is designed to rebalance control and power over data and hands more control back to consumers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to more broadly unlock industrial data. We welcomed the Act, organized briefings on it, and have advocated before policymakers to strengthen provisions around interoperability and business-to-government data sharing, among other matters.
• Supporting open access in the USA: The United States White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued guidance to all US federal agencies requiring federally funded research and research data to be made available to the public to access and reuse. We have long advocated for the importance of open access to publicly funded research data, and this is an important step toward building a better open commons of data that serves the public. We welcome this decision by the OSTP, and we look forward to working with US federal agencies to develop their public access plans.
• Ensuring data sharing is part of infrastructure policy in the UK: We submitted comments to the UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy’s open consultation Enabling a national Cyber-Physical Infrastructure to catalyse innovation. We argued to remove barriers to information and promote the sharing of data and knowledge by educators, activists, advocates, librarians, educators, lawyers, technologists, scientists and more.
• Exploring standards for sharing climate data: Through our work on the Open Climate Campaign, we have seen how large climate change datasets are distributed and not easily accessible to climate researchers and policy makers, due to a combination of varying technical formats and confusing legal terms of use. This year, we have begun to explore what it would take to develop a sharing standard for climate data (similar to the Digital Public Goods Standard that CC helped create), and are looking at how this effort could be sufficiently resourced.

What’s Next

In the coming year, we’ll continue to engage on specific legislation like the EU’s Data Act and campaign for ensuring that data can be put to critical public-interest purposes, including through our Open Climate Campaign. While the Data Act has requirements for business-to-government sharing in certain limited public policy circumstances, it’s also worth thinking about how to support public service entities in building and stewarding a broader data commons. Groups like Open Future and others have elaborated on this concept, and, for our part, CC’s Copyright Platform Working Group 2 “Digital Sharing Spaces” will be publishing a comparative mapping of the legal landscape for data sharing for research purposes across the US and EU. The European Commission has signaled that progress on health and mobility data spaces is a priority, and we look forward to contributing to these and other efforts.

The post Our Work in Policy at CC: Data appeared first on Creative Commons.

Hi Creative Commoners! We are back with a brand new episode of CC’s Open Minds … from Creative Commons podcast. 

In this episode, we switch things up from our typical interview style and play back the recording of Creative Commons’ hybrid roundtable on the EU Data Act, which took place in Brussels on 14 June 2022. CC CEO Catherine Stihler kicks things off with welcome remarks, and then Brigitte Vézina, CC’s Director of Open Culture and Policy, moderates a conversation between our distinguished panel of experts on how this new piece of legislation could reshape the rules governing value creation around data and unlock the potential for better sharing of knowledge and culture in the digital space across the EU and globally.

• Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and more. You can also subscribe via the show’s RSS feed.

Our speakers in this episode include: 

INTRODUCTION
Catherine Stihler | CEO, Creative Commons

MODERATOR
Brigitte Vézina | Director of Policy, Open Culture and GLAM, Creative Commons

PANEL

1. Christel Schaldemose | Member, European Parliament
2. Anna Ludin | Policy Officer DG CNECT G.1, Data Policy and Innovation, European Commission
3. Amandine Le Pape | COO/co-founder, Element, Guardian/co-founder, Matrix.org Foundation
4. Paul Keller | President/founding member, COMMUNIA

Please subscribe to the show in whatever podcast app you use, so you don’t miss any of our conversations with people working to make the internet and our global culture more open and collaborative.

The post Open Minds Podcast: *Special Episode* CC Roundtable on EU DATA ACT appeared first on Creative Commons.

April saw lots of activity on the open science front in the European Union. On April 19, the European Commission officially announced its plans to create an “Open Science Cloud”. Accompanying this initiative, the Commission stated it will require that scientific data produced by projects under Horizon 2020 (Europe’s €80 billion science funding program) be made openly available by default. Making open data the default will ensure that the scientific community, companies, and the general public can enjoy broad access (and reuse rights) to data generated by European funded scientific projects. The Commission’s actions in support of open science contrasts with the approach taken by the Member States, who—although none deny the momentum to push for “open by default”—are being much more cautious in developing and publishing open science policies.

Also in April, the Dutch EU Presidency hosted an open science conference in Amsterdam. One outcome of the conference was a collaboratively developed document called the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science. The call for action advocates for “full open access for all scientific publications”, and endorses an environment where “data sharing and stewardship is the default approach for all publicly funded research”.

The 12 action items laid out in the document push to increase support for open science in Europe. We offered suggested improvements to a few of the proposed actions. First, in response to the item to facilitate text and data mining of content, we said that text and data mining (TDM) activities should be considered outside the purview of copyright altogether. In other words, text and data mining should be considered as an extension of the right to read (“the right to read is the right to mine”). However, as others have pointed out, the fact that the InfoSoc and Database directives have not been implemented uniformly across all Member States indicates a need to adopt a pan-European exception in order to provide clarity to those wishing to conduct TDM. We noted that any exception for text and data mining should cover mining for any purpose, not just “for academic purposes.” In addition, a TDM exception should explicitly permit commercial activity. Finally, we said that terms of use, contractual obligations, digital rights management, or other mechanisms that attempt to prohibit the lawful right to conduct TDM should be forbidden.

Second, we questioned why the item to improve insight into IPR and issues such as privacy needs to take into consideration activities that “will ensure that private parties will still be able to profit from their investments.” We noted that all of the proposed actions are supposed to serve the identified pan-European goal of full open access to all scientific publications.

Third, we commended the action to adopt open access principles. However, we suggested that any principles developed should tackle a wider set of issues than those identified: “transparency, competition, sustainability, fair pricing, economic viability and pluralism.” We said that open access principles should take into account the long-standing principles described by the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and its 10-year update, which includes recommendations on public policy changes, licensing, infrastructure support, and advocacy. In addition, we said that the stakeholders involved in the development of any principles should include researchers, students, and the public.

Finally, on the item of how to involve researchers and new users in open science, we urged researchers to actively engage with other scientists, citizens, and non-traditional audiences. Part of this change means that academics and policymakers need to stop characterizing these other groups as “users [who] might get lost in their search for information, or draw wrong conclusions.” If we presume a default of open, we need to get comfortable with sharing—which sometimes means giving up some control—so that others can benefit. With openness in policy and practice, the communication of science can benefit not only its intended audience, but promote novel and interesting types of re-use across disciplines and and by unconventional users.

The post EU pushing ahead in support of open science appeared first on Creative Commons.

Logo of the Wikimedia Foundation
by User:Neolux
CC BY-SA 3.0

The details of the open access policy can be found on the Wikimedia Foundation website. There will be an expectation that researchers receiving funds from the foundation will provide “unrestricted access to and reuse of all their research output…”. Published materials, proposals, and supporting materials will be covered under the open access policy. The policy states that media files must be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license (the version currently used by Wikipedia), or any other free license. In addition, the policy requires that data be made available under an Open Definition-conformant license (with the CC0 Public Domain Dedication preferred), and that any source code be licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.0 or any other Open Source Initiative-approved license.

The open access policy from the Wikimedia Foundation joins other institutions–including governments, philanthropic foundations, universities, and intergovernmental organizations who have adopted policies to increase access to important and useful information and data for the public good. Thanks to Wikimedia for their continued leadership in support of free knowledge for all.

The post Wikimedia adopts open licensing policy for foundation-funded research appeared first on Creative Commons.

Yesterday the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced it is adopting an open access policy for grant-funded research. The policy “enables the unrestricted access and reuse of all peer-reviewed published research funded, in whole or in part, by the foundation, including any underlying data sets.” Grant funded research and data must be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY). The policy applies to all foundation program areas and takes effect January 1, 2015.

Here are more details from the Foundation’s Open Access Policy:

1. Publications Are Discoverable and Accessible Online. Publications will be deposited in a specified repository(s) with proper tagging of metadata.
2. Publication Will Be On “Open Access” Terms. All publications shall be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License (CC BY 4.0) or an equivalent license. This will permit all users of the publication to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and transform and build upon the material, including for any purpose (including commercial) without further permission or fees being required.
3. Foundation Will Pay Necessary Fees. The foundation would pay reasonable fees required by a publisher to effect publication on these terms.
4. Publications Will Be Accessible and Open Immediately. All publications shall be available immediately upon their publication, without any embargo period. An embargo period is the period during which the publisher will require a subscription or the payment of a fee to gain access to the publication. We are, however, providing a transition period of up to two years from the effective date of the policy (or until January 1, 2017). During the transition period, the foundation will allow publications in journals that provide up to a 12-month embargo period.
5. Data Underlying Published Research Results Will Be Accessible and Open Immediately. The foundation will require that data underlying the published research results be immediately accessible and open. This too is subject to the transition period and a 12-month embargo may be applied.

Trevor Mundel, President of Global Health at the foundation, said that Gates “put[s] a high priority not only on the research necessary to deliver the next important drug or vaccine, but also on the collection and sharing of data so other scientists and health experts can benefit from this knowledge.”

Congratulations to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on adopting a default open licensing policy for its grant-funded research. This terrific announcement follows a similar move by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, who recently extended their CC BY licensing policy from the Open Educational Resources grants to now apply foundation-wide for all project-based grant funds.

Regarding deposit and sharing of data, the Gates Foundation might consider permitting grantees to utilize the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, which allows authors to dedicate data to the public domain by waiving all rights to the data worldwide under copyright law. CC0 is widely used to provide barrier-free re-use to data.

We’ve updated the information we’ve been tracking on foundation intellectual property policies to reflect the new agreement from Gates, and continue to urge other philanthropic foundations to adopt open policies for grant-funded research and projects.

The post Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to require CC BY for all grant-funded research appeared first on Creative Commons.

Earlier this month, CODATA and World Data System, both interdisciplinary committees of the International Council for Science, jointly organized SciDataCon, an international conference on data sharing for global sustainability. The conference was held Nov 2-5, 2014, on the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Creative Commons Science had a busy schedule at the conference attended by 170+ delegates from all over the world, many from the global south.

Photo by Puneet Kishor published under CC0 Public Domain Dedication

We started early with a full day workshop on text and data mining (TDM) in cooperation with Content Mine. The workshop was attended by a mix of PhD students and researchers from the fields of immunology and plant genomics research. It was really rewarding to see the participants get a handle on the software and go through the exercises. Finally, the conversation about legal uncertainty around TDM appraised them about the challenges, but bottom-up support for TDM can be a strong ally in ensuring that this practice remains out of the reach of legal restrictions.

During the main conference we joined panel discussions on data citation with Bonnie Carroll (Iia), Brian Hole (Ubiquity Press), Paul Uhlir (NAS) and Jan Brase (DataCite) and international data sharing with Chaitanya Baru (NSF), Rama Hampapuram (NASA) and Ross Wilkinson (ANDS). We also participated in a daily roundup of the state of data sharing as presented at the conference organized by Elizabeth Griffin (CNRC).

SciDataCon, which used to be called CODATA, is held every two years, and is an important showcase of open science around the world. It is an important gathering for it brings together many scientists from the global south. A lot remains to be done to make real-time, pervasive data sharing and reuse a reality in much of the world, but there are heartening signs. At a national level, India’s data portal holds promise, but making data licensing information more explicit and data easily searchable by license would make it more useful. Citizen science projects in the Netherlands, India and Taiwan demonstrated how crowds can be involved in experiments while ensuring the user-generated content is made available for reuse, and SNEHA’s work on understanding perspectives on data sharing for public health research was particularly insightful of the value of listening to the feedback from participants.

We look forward to continue working with CODATA and WDS promoting and supporting open science and data initiatives around the world, and particularly in the global south, and hope for more success stories in the next SciDataCon.

The post SciDataCon 2014 Recap appeared first on Creative Commons.

SciDataCon2014 in New Delhi

The International Conference on Data Sharing and Integration for Global Sustainability (SciDataCon) is motivated by the conviction that the most research challenges cannot be addressed without attending to issues relating to research data essential to all scientific endeavors. However, several cultural and technological challenges are still preventing the research community from realizing the full benefits of progress in open access and sharing. CODATA and WDS, interdisciplinary committees of the International Council for Science (ICSU) are co-sponsoring and organizing a high profile international biennial conference at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Nov 2: A day long Text and data mining (TDM) workshop offered in collaboration with ContentMine

TDM is an important scientific technique for analyzing large corpora of articles used to uncover both existing and new insights in unstructured data sets that typically are obtained programmatically from many different sources. While the science and technology TDM is complex enough, its legal complications are equally dizzying. Not only is its legal status unclear at best, it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction making cross-national collaboration difficult. Besides the license status of the original material, contractual agreements between research institutions and publishers, who are often the gatekeepers of the corpora, can create significant hurdles. The workshop offers an introduction to TDM, presenting the legal considerations through hands-on exercises.

Nov 3: How well is the data chain working?

Effective and efficient application of scientific data for the benefit of humanity entails agreed goals, clear and reproducible methods, and transparent communication throughout the data chain from producer to user via data organizer and research publisher. How well is that working? A Panel Discussion at the close of each day will summarise that day’s conclusions, and respond to the question of how well the data chain may be working from a trio of perspectives: Conference Organizer, data-management expert, and data producer.

Nov 5: Citing Data to Facilitate Multidisciplinary Research

Synthesis Data Citation Principles and Their Implications for TDM: Importance, Credit and Attribution, Evidence, Unique Identification, Access, Persistence, Specificity and Verifiability, and Interoperability and Flexibility: these eight important phrases describe the data citation principles agreed upon by the community and published under a joint declaration and endorsed by 185 individuals and 83 organizations. But, what are the implications of these principles beyond just citation, particularly with respect to automated analysis of large corpus of articles? This presentation will briefly present the principles, and then explore some of the issues that we have to come to grips with in order to make text and data mining (TDM) easy for scientists.

Nov 5: Challenges and Benefits of Open Science Data and International Data Sharing

Maximizing Legal Interoperability Through Open Licenses: Many scientists do think about interoperability as they have to work with colleagues from other domains. However, common interoperability efforts are focused on technical, and if we are lucky, semantic interoperability. Rarely do scientists think of legal interoperability in the design of their science experiments. Can my work be legally mixed with someone else’s work without violating any intellectual property (or worse, privacy and security) laws? Is my work portable across not just scientific domains but also across judicial boundaries? We attempt to shed light on some of these questions in this presentation.

Nov 5: Talk on CC/OKF open science activities to be given at the computer science dept., Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi

Jenny Molloy, OKFN Open Science and I will be introducing the young computer science students at IIT-Delhi on the various open science and data activities around the world. This talk is organized by Prof. Aaditeshwar Seth, Computer Science, IIT-Delhi.

Nov 6-8: Meetings on citizen science and sensors at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE), Mumbai

HBCSE at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai is a National Center with the broad goals to promote equity and excellence in science and mathematics education from primary school to undergraduate college level, and encourage the growth of scientific literacy in the country. We will be discussing with HBCSE’s metaStudio potential areas of collaboration in citizen science and the use of sensors in projects to accelerate the growth of scientific awareness in the country through direct public participation in science.

The post CC Science's Indian November appeared first on Creative Commons.