Earlier this year, Creative Commons published our Recommendations for Better Sharing of Climate Data, a seminal resource to help national and intergovernmental climate data-producing agencies use legal terms, licenses, and metadata values that ensure climate data is accessible, shareable, and reusable. Our goal is to share strategies and provide resources that enable interconnected and interoperable climate data to be used to find faster solutions to mitigating the climate crisis. The Recommendations are available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. 

With generous funding from the McGovern Foundation, we are now focused on supporting climate agencies that are implementing the Recommendations at scale. Our Recommendations suggest two options for legal terms and licenses on climate data: 

• Option A: CC0 + Attribution Request, in order to maximize reuse by dedicating climate data to the public domain, plus a request for attribution.
• Option B: CC BY 4.0, for retaining data ownership and legal enforcement of attribution.

In developing these Recommendations, we consulted with some of the largest producers of climate data around the globe to ensure successful implementation. Our Recommendations also address the use of metadata values that center legal terms, attribution, and provenance. Additionally, we detail how to navigate license stacking and attribution stacking for users working with multiple climate data sources.

To highlight the impact of this work, we collaborated with GEO (the Group on Earth Observations). GEO facilitates access to Earth observation data crucial for decision-making in nine priority areas, including disasters, climate change, and ecosystem management. This data is collected and shared by GEO’s 116 members spanning the entire world. Collaborating with GEO connects us to a vast network of experts and resources dedicated to addressing critical global challenges. The GEO Programme Board has endorsed new and aligned guidance promoting the use of CC0 or CC BY as standard open data licenses on GEO data, as a continuation of GEO’s own leadership role in advancing open Earth Observation (EO) data policy. Their goal is to facilitate the use of open EO data and products for GEO members, participating organizations, and initiatives.

Values-Aligned Open Licensing

The principle of open data has been embraced throughout the EO community, with more than 400 million open data resources from national, regional, international, and commercial providers now available. It is also reflected through efforts such as the FAIR Principles, Open Science initiatives, and the GEO Statement on Open Knowledge.

For climate data to be most effective, data users need to understand their legal rights and obligations when using data. Unfortunately, while data may be described as “full and open”, this does not always provide sufficient legal clarity. Additionally, some data providers have begun to use custom, lengthy “End User License Agreements” that include restrictions on use and require close legal review. This creates challenges when trying to use a single dataset, and those challenges are greatly compounded when combining multiple datasets. Our goal with the Recommendations for Better Sharing of Climate Data is to address this challenge head-on by providing alternate, values-aligned data licensing recommendations that ensure this climate data is used to its fullest potential in understanding and mitigating the climate crisis. 

Creative Commons has been a participating member of the GEO Data Working Group since 2023, when we learned that the GEO Data Management Principles aligned with our Recommendations. We have worked with GEO to help shape the priorities and programs of the organization as we jointly support members with implementing GEO Data Sharing Principles. 

From Implementation to Action

On 21 November 2024, members of the Creative Commons team met with the GEO membership to provide an overview of the Recommendations and discuss their application across GEO Work Programme Activities. After an introduction of the work on open data in the Law and Policy subgroup, we showed how our recommendations were aligned with GEO principles and how their data will be easier to reuse through more open licenses and appropriate metadata. Two use cases from GEO were also presented, highlighting some challenges that may arise during implementation. The participants came well prepared with questions related to their own organizations and policies and the discussion was lively all the way to the end. Thank you to GEO for making a recording of the webinar available on the GEO Knowledge Hub. Take a look! 

You can also take a look at the presentation slides from all participants. 

Mitigating Challenges

One challenge, repeated by several participants, is incoming data having unclear or restrictive licenses, making derivative products challenging to license openly. We acknowledge this is complicated, and therefore it is often most fruitful to discuss directly with the data providers to try to get a license that would be compatible with the principles, leveraging the GEO community behind them. 

Another challenge that was highlighted through the poll questions in the workshop was knowledge about where to find the policies of the organizations’ own data sharing policies. This can be mitigated by internal knowledge sharing, and also prominent and public posting of data sharing policies on organizational l websites. A third challenge was that the policy may say that data should be opened but not specifying a license. Here, our Recommendations can really be of help by giving concrete options of licenses along with instructions on how to apply them.

Next Steps

GEO members are now equipped with the tools and guidance to review their policies and data sharing platforms. As a next step, GEO members will begin implementing the Recommendations, which will mean that the workflows of the people publishing the climate data will be smoother, more datasets will be published with the proper and open license, and there will be less confusion for the reusers of the data. 

Partners Along the Way

Thanks to the funding from the McGovern Foundation, we can continue to guide and mentor the GEO community in reviewing their data policies and implementing the Recommendations to more practically streamline their workflows for sharing data. 

At Creative Commons, we not only steward the CC licenses and the legal infrastructure of sharing, but we also are partners in learning and training on all things open and the CC licenses. We empower people to grow and sustain the thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture. We aim to address the world’s most pressing challenges and create a brighter future for all. Access to knowledge is necessary to solve big, complex problems, like the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) for Climate Action. The Creative Commons Open Climate work promotes open access to research and data, to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity and ecology. If you are in an organization publishing climate data, we would also love to help you to make it open, accessible and reusable to help mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change. Please contact us by email at info@creativecommons.org. If you are looking for general training about licenses or consulting not related to climate, please visit our training and consulting page to see our offers.

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In December last year, the Communia Association for the Public Domain — of which Creative Commons (CC) is a member —  asked the European Commission and European Parliament to consider the development of a Digital Knowledge Act. In this blog post, we offer some background on the proposal and explain why CC fully supports it. 

Rationale for a Digital Knowledge Act

European knowledge institutions (libraries, universities, schools, etc.) as well as researchers face numerous copyright challenges in the digital environment. Access to academic publications, their reproduction for research purposes, text-and-data mining, etc. are all activities that are necessary to conduct serious research but are hampered by misaligned copyright rules, especially where cross-border collaboration is key.  

As top EU institutions are gearing up for a new mandate for the next five years, a Digital Knowledge Act would enable knowledge institutions to fulfill their mission and offer the same services online as offline. Such a regulation could improve copyright law by introducing the following for the benefit of knowledge institutions: 

• a unified research exception
• an EU-wide e-lending right
• a limited liability regime for those acting in good faith
• reasonable licensing conditions
• a right to circumvent technological protection measures.

CC’s work on policy and open knowledge

CC recognizes that equitable policy which enables and promotes open access (OA) is pivotal to making knowledge open. For example, in 2022 CC, in partnership with SPARC and EIFL, launched the Open Climate Campaign, a four-year project working to make the open sharing of research the norm in climate science. At the center of this work is partnering with national governments, private funders, and environmental organizations to develop open access policies for their grantees. Another project aims to identify recommended best practices for better sharing of climate data and yet another strives to promote open licensing for life sciences preprints. Through these OA policies and best practices we believe we can change the culture of sharing and promote the adoption of open practices for knowledge to grow and help solve the greatest challenges of our times.  

Why we support this initiative

But discrete open access policies and best practices are not enough. Knowledge institutions need to be able to rely on a clear, harmonized, and supportive legal system that operates across borders. That is why CC’s policy work centers on promoting better sharing of knowledge and culture through global copyright reform. Knowledge institutions are pivotal actors in the fight against climate change and hold many of the keys to unlock knowledge. If we are going to solve the world’s biggest problems, the knowledge about them must be open, and institutions , which hold that knowledge in trust for the public, must be able to operate within a legal framework that is conducive to their core mission and purpose. A Digital Knowledge Act would provide such a structure at an EU-wide scale and would contribute to accelerating research, boosting scientific progress, and spurring knowledge-based innovation for a sustainable future. 

For additional guidance on open knowledge policy, contact us at info@creativecommons.org

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Today, Creative Commons (CC) is excited to announce new programmatic support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) to help make openly licensed preprints the primary vehicle of scientific dissemination.

“We are delighted to have been awarded this new grant to help us leverage our expertise to make life sciences research more open and accessible,” said Catherine Stihler, CC CEO. “From open review to translation to AI and machine-learning applications, realizing the full potential of preprints is predicated on them being openly licensed.”

The eighteen-month grant will enable CC to collaborate with CZI on a project focused on significantly increasing use of the CC BY 4.0 license on preprints in the life sciences by working with funders, preprint servers, and other preprint stakeholders.

“Preprint servers have seen a marked increase in uploads across many scientific disciplines, particularly in the life sciences¹, spurred by recognition of the importance of timely, open access to research results during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Dario Taraborelli, Science Program Officer at CZI. “Preprints are not only a faster pathway to the dissemination of research results, they also enable the development of an entire scholarly communication ecosystem around them. We are excited to partner with CC to further develop and strengthen this ecosystem and bring together funders, institutions, preprint servers, and other stakeholders to promote openly licensed preprints.”

“We are so pleased to have our open access research work further supported by CZI,” said Cable Green, CC Director of Open Knowledge. “Opening preprints is essential to our strategy to support better sharing, which includes helping scientists open and share all the components of their research — without long publication timelines — to support access, text and data mining, reproducibility, and further inquiry.”

This work 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, and our Open Climate Data Project, an initiative to help open large climate datasets.

1. See https://github.com/nicholasmfraser/covid19_preprints

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As a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge, we strongly support the Internet Archive in its defense of Controlled Digital Lending. Free, equitable, and open access to all knowledge stimulates creativity, is essential for research and learning, and constitutes a bedrock principle of free and democratic societies.

The Internet Archive is leading the fight for establishing permanent access to historical collections that exist in digital format. With Controlled Digital Lending, libraries like the Internet Archive can lend one copy of digitized material from their collection to one borrower for a limited time, just like they would a physical book.

Today, galleries, libraries, archives, museums and others are using new technologies and legal tools like Creative Commons licenses to make their collections more accessible. At the same time, we hear time and again that copyright remains a major barrier for these institutions in fulfilling their public interest missions — cutting off access to knowledge and limiting their ability to preserve our collective heritage. At Creative Commons, we believe copyright should encourage Controlled Digital Lending and ensure that legal mechanisms are in place to support this practice that benefits everyone.

This isn’t a position that we just came to on our own; instead, it came from working hand in hand with cultural and knowledge institutions across the world. Like Communia’s policy recommendations state: “libraries should be enabled to fulfill their mission in the digital environment.” As libraries modernize their services, we need to protect the legal frameworks that support their digital lending practices.

Permitting and protecting Controlled Digital Lending is a key way to help ensure copyright is fit for the modern age. Guided by our strong belief in better sharing, CC will continue to support the Internet Archive’s crucial efforts to ensure the public can access knowledge and culture on a global level.

[Note: 12 April 2023: We have updated this post to remove findings that are not supported by available evidence.]

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This grant, which builds on $450,000 (USD) in planning funds from the Open Society Foundations, will fund a four-year campaign to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity by promoting open access to research.

“While the reality of climate change and the resulting loss of biodiversity is certain, the research about these global challenges and the possible actions to tackle them are too often not publicly accessible. In order to solve these pressing problems, the knowledge about them must be made immediately and freely open to all,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director at SPARC.

“The Campaign has assembled experts from across the fields of climate change, biodiversity, open science, scholarly publishing and open education to develop a campaign that we believe will lead to the open sharing of research outputs as the norm for researchers, governments, funders and environmental organizations,” said Rima Kupryte, Director at Electronic Information for Libraries.

The Campaign will:

• Bring attention to the issue of access to knowledge on climate change and biodiversity.
• Work directly with national governments, funders and environmental organizations to create open access policies and make it easier to share their climate change content.
• Identify, engage and contribute to draft international frameworks to include open access policy recommendations.
• Identify important existing climate and biodiversity research publications not already open access and help them move to open access where possible. We will also explore tactics to facilitate changes in publisher actions to ensure climate and biodiversity research is open access.
• Engage with researchers, universities and policy makers in traditionally excluded geographical regions to ensure inclusive outcomes throughout.

“Climate change is the most pressing global challenge facing humanity. When research and data are closed behind paywalls and people are excluded from the conversation, progress is stifled and we all lose out. This campaign will ensure inclusive, just and equitable access to the essential knowledge we will all need to fight the climate crisis,” said Catherine Stihler, CEO at Creative Commons.

“OSF is thrilled to partner with the Arcadia Fund to support Creative Commons, SPARC, and EIFL, global leaders of the open access movement, to launch the Open Climate Campaign. The quick response from the international research and publishing communities to make all research on COVID-19, and now monkeypox, openly available, demonstrates that to properly address the world’s greatest challenges, research needs to be open. OSF has called for all research to be made openly available, since we helped to define open access to research twenty years ago. I believe the Open Climate Campaign will serve as a model for opening research in other critical fields,” said Melissa Hagemann, Senior Program Officer at the Open Society Foundations.

More information can be found at openclimatecampaign.org.

About

Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world’s pressing challenges.

SPARC
SPARC is a non-profit advocacy organization that supports systems for research and education that are open by default and equitable by design.

EIFL
EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) works with libraries in Africa, Asia Pacific and Europe to enable access to knowledge for education, learning, research and sustainable community development.

Arcadia
Arcadia supports charities and scholarly institutions that preserve cultural heritage and the environment. Arcadia also supports projects that promote open access and all of its awards are granted on the condition that any materials produced are made available for free online. Since 2002, Arcadia has awarded more than $910 million to projects around the world.

Open Society Foundations
The Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, are the world’s largest private funder of independent groups working for justice, democratic governance, and human rights.

Media Contact
Nate Angell <press@creativecommons.org>
Director of Communications & Community
Creative Commons

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Creative Commons celebrates this big news along with the wider open community that we have worked with for so long to ensure publicly funded resources are freely available and openly licensed (or dedicated to the public domain) by default. The public deserves to have uninhibited, equitable and immediate access to use and re-use the research, data, educational resources, software and other content it funds. Our collective ability to create and share digital public goods to create a better world requires it. This new OSTP guidance realizes essential elements of that vision.

Importantly, this memo removes the current 12-month embargo period for access to federally funded research, and it makes the research data openly available in machine readable formats. All US agencies have up to three years to fully implement their updated policies, including ending the optional 12-month embargo. See OSTP’s blog posts for more detail on this historic announcement (1 / 2 / 3).

This action is in line with the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and brings the US Government in line with other governments who have established open access policies and principles to ensure their public investments support the public good.

The US government spends over $80 billion each year funding research in order to cure diseases, mitigate climate change, advance green energy, and more. Governments around the world do the same. Yet the copyright to publicly funded research is often turned over to commercial journals, placed behind paywalls, and then sold back to the public which has already paid for it. This model has always been unacceptable, and the need for governments to ask commercial journals to provide temporary open access to COVID-19 and monkeypox research has made it even more so.

Beyond systematically opening access to existing knowledge, the OSTP memo also requires US federal agencies to expand who contributes to new knowledge. As our colleagues at SPARC explain, the guidance “asks agencies to take measures to reduce inequities in both the publishing of and access to federally funded research publications and data, especially among individuals from underserved backgrounds and those who are early in their careers.”

Working to establish inclusive, just and equitable knowledge is at the heart of CC’s strategy to go beyond just sharing to enable better sharing. If we want to solve the world’s most pressing problems, knowledge about and contributions to those problems must be open. How can we possibly come up with global solutions for climate change, cancer, poverty, clean water and more if everyone is not able to access and contribute to the research, data and educational resources about these challenges? Answer: we cannot.

This OSTP policy memo is a significant win for open access research, and we hope more national governments around the world implement similar open policies. This is a critical step toward the scientific knowledge sharing model we all need, and there is more work to do. If we want to move beyond mere access and towards better sharing of the knowledge we collectively produce and use, we need to work toward (1) open licensing to ensure open re-use rights, and (2) community owned and managed public knowledge infrastructure.

Open Re-Use Rights

CC has, for 20 years, called for open access research policies that require the CC BY license on research articles, CC0 on the research data, and a zero embargo period. The OSTP memo does not specifically call for open licensing, but instead indicates agency plans should describe: “The circumstances or prerequisites needed to make the publications freely and publicly available by default, including any use and re-use rights, and which restrictions, including attribution, may apply.” While this is a good start, CC looks forward to working with the ​Subcommittee on Open Science (which will decide which agency public access plans are compliant with the new guidance) and to provide direct support to US agencies on best practices for open licensing and attribution as they update their public access plans. By requiring full re-use rights, publicly funded research outputs can be broadly shared and analyzed by other experts and technology to fully leverage taxpayer investments.

Public Knowledge Infrastructure

As the scholarly research community and libraries continue to struggle with high subscription fees and/or expensive article processing charges (APCs), Diamond Open Access is emerging as an interesting model for ensuring inclusive and equitable access to both read and submit research articles to community / academic owned and maintained open infrastructure. CC recently endorsed the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access. CC looks forward to partnering with governments, civil society organizations and researchers to examine and redesign unjust, inequitable knowledge systems, and guide open communities to new, equitable open knowledge models that are designed for the public good. We’ll be writing more about Diamond Open Access and Diamond Open Education models in future posts.

As we continue to work toward fully open re-use rights in every country and global public knowledge infrastructure, Creative Commons congratulates the Biden-Harris Administration for their ongoing leadership on this critical policy issue. CC stands ready to support OSTP and US agencies as they update and implement their open access policies over the coming years. For support from Creative Commons, please contact: Dr. Cable Green, Director of Open Knowledge.

The post A Big Win for Open Access: United States Mandates All Publicly Funded Research Be Freely Available with No Embargo appeared first on Creative Commons.

Graphic on page 11. UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. CC BY IGO 3.0

Creative Commons (CC) applauds the unanimous ratification of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science at UNESCO’s 41st General Conference. This landmark document is a major step forward towards creating a world in which better sharing of science is open and inclusive by design.

CC is honored to have been part of the global community that drafted, reviewed and revised the Recommendation. We firmly believe open access to knowledge is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition to solving big, complex problems. Better sharing of scientific articles, data and science educational resources is a necessary condition to make progress on solving the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the global grand challenges we face today.

As the COVID pandemic and climate change have exemplified, there is an urgent need to accelerate change in how we produce, share, and communicate scientific knowledge. The UNESCO Recommendations on Open Science and Open Educational Resources are international frameworks that can guide national governments, funders, educational institutions, scientists, educators, and civil society organizations as we work to create a world in which open access to knowledge is a basic human right.

The Recommendation sets an international standard for the definition of open science and associated policies and practices to drive better sharing throughout the global science community. It details seven broad areas for action:

• Promoting a common understanding of open science and its benefits and challenges, as well as diverse paths to open science
• Developing and enabling a policy environment for open science
• Investing in open science infrastructures and services
• Investing in human resources, training, education, digital literacy and capacity building
• Fostering a culture of open science and aligning incentives
• Promoting innovative approaches for open science across the scientific process
• Promoting cooperation in the context of open science to reduce digital, technological and knowledge gaps

For details on the multi-stakeholder consultations, the open science advisory committee, and the UNESCO global open science partnership, please visit the Recommendation on Open Science website.

Of course, adopting the Recommendation for Open Science is just the first step. The real work is in the implementation of the actions. Broad implementation success will require governments to: prioritize this work, partner with international NGOs and other stakeholders working in open science, and work with and learn from other governments. Creative Commons stands ready to partner with national governments, UNESCO, NGOs, and the global research community to implement the actions detailed in this Recommendation to build a brighter future for everyone, everywhere.

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Open Science No Text. By: Greg Emmerich. CC BY-SA 3.0

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference, officially known as the 26th Conference of Parties, or COP26, continues in Glasgow, Scotland, I’m pleased to share some good news. The Open Society Foundations approved funding for Creative Commons, SPARC and EIFL to lead a global campaign promoting open access to climate and biodiversity research. This is a promising new strategy to encourage governments, foundations, institutes, universities and environmental organizations to use “open” to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and to preserve global biodiversity. Catherine Stihler, CC’s CEO and a native of Scotland, publicly announced the campaign during her keynote at the University of St Andrews’ Power to the people event and will have the opportunity to announce the campaign at a COP26 fringe event – Open UK: Open Technology for Sustainability – on 11 November. CC is particularly happy to have the opportunity to work closely with our longtime allies in the open access movement to ensure that this effort is truly a global campaign, and hope that this initiative will help to provide a blueprint for future funding of similar collaborative campaigns.

Additional Detail

Climate change, and the resulting harm to our global biodiversity, is one of the world’s most pressing challenges. The complexity of the climate crisis requires collaborative global interventions that center on equity and evidence-based mitigation practices informed by multidisciplinary research. Many researchers, governments, and global environmental organizations recognize the importance of the open sharing of research to accelerate progress, but lack cohesive strategies and mechanisms to facilitate effective knowledge sharing and collaboration across disciplinary and geographic borders. 

During the COVID-19 crisis, the power of open access to democratize knowledge sharing, accelerate discovery, promote research collaboration, and bring together the efforts of global stakeholders to tackle the pandemic took center stage. Scientists embraced the immediate, open sharing of preprints, research articles, data and code. This embrace of openness contributed to the rapid sequencing and sharing of the virus’ genome, the quick development of therapeutics, and the fastest development of effective vaccines in human history. The lessons learned during the pandemic can – and should – be applied to accelerate progress on other urgent problems facing society. 

The goal of this project is to create a truly global campaign to promote open access, open science and open data as effective enabling strategies to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity. It will develop effective messaging, strategies, and tactics to empower stakeholders currently leading critical climate and biodiversity work to embed open practices and policies in their operations, and make open sharing of research the default.  

We expect to identify the most important climate and biodiversity research publications not already OA and coordinate a campaign to open those publications, remove legal and policy barriers to applying open licenses to research articles, influence key funders (governments, foundations, and institutes) of climate science and biodiversity research to adopt and implement strong OA policies, and identify opportunities to open climate and biodiversity educational resources so students, teachers and citizens can learn about these global challenges and help contribute to solutions.

We will encourage global environment organizations to adopt open licensing policies to ensure all their content is free to be reused, built upon and shared for the global public good, delivering on their SDG commitments. We will engage with researchers, universities and policy makers in the Global South to ensure inclusive outcomes throughout.

We will share additional news on this campaign as it progresses.

The post Creating a Campaign to Increase Open Access to Research on Climate Science and Biodiversity: A joint initiative of Creative Commons, EIFL and SPARC appeared first on Creative Commons.

As International Open Access Week (25 – 31 October) draws to a close, the UK prepares to welcome the world to the COP26 summit (31 October – 12 November). Creative Commons CEO, Catherine Stihler, says the UK has the opportunity to unlock digital democracy if the government invests in and commits to open software, openly licensed content, research and data. 

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that new ways of sharing information and knowledge are possible.

Open access, data and content have played a critical role, from developing a vaccine in record speed to citizen science initiatives tackling the virus in local communities. 

But as we mark International Open Access Week across the globe, it’s clear that these lessons are not universally being learned.

Restrictive copyright systems and other barriers to access and sharing of knowledge and information are threatening the foundations of our free and democratic societies.

As the UK prepares to welcome the world to COP26, the importance of open data and open science in providing evidence-based solutions and required actions to achieve net zero and mitigate the impact of climate change is clear.

But the need for open access goes far wider than just the UK – it applies across the global research space, which must work together for the public good.

And there is an opportunity for a Global Britain that showcases the use of open software, openly licensed content and research and data, and becomes a leading player at home and abroad.

The launch of a new National Data Strategy and the UK Research and Innovation’s new open access policy are positive developments; but the UK’s ambitions must not be confined to its own borders. The challenges ahead of us require a global response.

If our international influence is as strong as the UK Government claims it is, then the current G7 presidency is an opportunity for the Foreign Office to champion open tools and promote the design and application of new technologies that reflect our democratic and ethical values. 

Because there are major challenges to openness across the world.

In China, we see the opposite of digital democracy – digital autocracy. 

The Chinese state-run biometric facial recognition technology holds data that controls an entire population in real-time. 

No other country has this level of surveillance conducted by the state.

If we are to succeed in creating technology, as the G7 has described, which respects human rights and the rule of law, then we will need to lead on creating trusted, open and accountable systems – with a human hand of care looking after the public’s interest. 

Currently, there is a rash of regulation hurtling towards policy makers – some in the name of online safety, which could have the effect of stifling free speech, banning online content which would otherwise be legal offline, and detrimentally affecting individual human rights and freedom of expression. 

Proposals in Australia, according to Digital Rights Watch, could see new laws which would allow for hacking into your computer, your online accounts and any networks you had been in contact with.  

So to be a leader in digital democracy, we need to be aware of the complexity and trade-offs required both to defend and promote open societies. 

The UK can look to Taiwan for an open reformation approach.

Taiwan’s success is down to its leadership and recognition of what open software enables; but then there are very few governments across the globe with someone like Audrey Tang, a free software developer, at the helm of digital policy making.

For the UK to be a leader in digital democracy, we need to place open digital tools at the heart of government decision-making. 

Huge amounts of data and knowledge remain locked away even after a decade of open government initiatives.  

What if, barring reasons of national security, all UK Government data was openly licensed in the same format and then promoted by those departments for citizen use, or even cross departmental collaboration and experimentation? 

What if there’s a new collaboration of ‘digital open champions’ (DOCs) – data scientists and ethics-driven civil servants who can communicate with a lay audience?

Because while freeing data is one step, communicating clearly and effectively the potential usage is another.

This International Open Access Week, coming just ahead of COP26 and near the end of the UK’s G7 presidency, is an opportunity to unlock digital democracy – benefiting our citizens, parliaments and governments.

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As part of our work supporting efforts in the creation, adoption and implementation of open access policies with various institutions, Creative Commons (CC) was pleased to lend its knowledge to assist UKRI in developing its open access policy as part of the Open Access Review last year. Generally, CC is committed to the goal of ensuring that the public is able to access immediately, free of charge, and without restriction, the peer-reviewed research articles and academic books resulting from publicly funded research. We are pleased to see that the comments we provided back in May 2020 have been taken into account in the review process. We are especially glad to see that key requirements of the new policy include immediate open access for research articles and the release of publications under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY) (CC BY ND by exception only*).

CC licenses and tools have become the standard in research publication open licensing. They are free, easy-to-use, simple and standardized licenses that enable researchers to share the articles or monographs they wrote with everyone, worldwide, on the conditions that they determine. In practice, this means research articles and data can be freely reused by others, thereby enhancing collaboration among researchers, accelerating the pace of scientific discovery, and facilitating the dissemination of reliable, practical information to the public.

For guidance on implementing an open access policy or using the CC License Suite, please contact us at info@creativecommons.org—we’re here to help.

*At CC, we believe that the use of CC BY ND licenses should not be encouraged for open access publishing, because those licenses restrict standard reuses that researchers and the general public need to be able to do in order to maximize the benefit of research outputs, such as adaptations for a different readership or translation into other languages. By contrast, CC BY-licensed research can be translated into other languages, adapted for use as open educational resources in the classroom, or shared widely on other platforms that champion the spread of knowledge, such as Wikipedia.

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