Open Science Archives - Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/category/open-knowledge/open-science/ Tue, 04 Feb 2025 15:39:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.3.5 CC Open Science: 2024 Year in Review https://creativecommons.org/2024/12/18/cc-open-science-2024-year-in-review/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cc-open-science-2024-year-in-review Wed, 18 Dec 2024 18:41:16 +0000 https://creativecommons.org/?p=75728 Science by Steve Rotman is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Access to science is a fundamental human right, and yet, much of that public good is inaccessible because of paywalls and limited in its reuse because of restrictive copyright licenses. The CC licenses are an essential part of open science infrastructure and provide a legal…

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Science by Steve Rotman is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Access to science is a fundamental human right, and yet, much of that public good is inaccessible because of paywalls and limited in its reuse because of restrictive copyright licenses. The CC licenses are an essential part of open science infrastructure and provide a legal tool for sharing, reusing, innovating, and further benefiting from publicly-funded scientific research that belongs to all of us. 

For more than 20 years, research outputs such as journal articles, books, conference proceedings, theses, and more have been made available through the application of a CC license. CC licenses are embedded into the workflows of scholarly publishers and academic librarians in ways that have dramatically increased the discoverability and usability of research outputs by other researchers and the general public, including journalists, policy makers, activists, and curious individuals. Increased access to knowledge is enabled through open science practices and policies which are empowered by CC licenses. 

As we wrap up a year of global elections, increasing global warming, enduring the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, while ensuring innovation and discovery to address the next, all while navigating sharing in an age of COVID-19, nothing seems more important than ensuring open access to research. It is for that reason that we are proud to share some highlights of our open science initiatives at CC in 2024 and share our plans and priorities for open science and the role of CC licenses in the coming years. 

Advances in Open Climate

Open access  is a necessary condition to solving the climate crisis. Not only is the  knowledge about our understanding of climate change and its impacts contained in research outputs but so are the solutions to climate change. At CC we want to enable access to these research outputs to help address the climate crisis. CC is well positioned to leverage our expertise in the open access, data and licences to help  researchers, librarians, consortia, policy makers, and other stakeholders in scholarly communication open research outputs. Opening up climate change research and data is climate action.

Open Climate Data Project

Generously funded by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, this project is  facilitating better sharing of climate data with CC licensing, metadata, and database user-interface practices.  CC published 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. CC is also working with some of the largest producers of climate data including the GEO (Group on Earth Observations) to guide and  implement these recommendations

The Open Climate Campaign

This year is also the last year of the Open Climate Campaign, a joint initiative between CC, SPARC, and EIFL, funded by Arcadia. The Campaign, which ran for two years made a significant impact in raising awareness about the lack of access to climate research and unveiled how essential open science and open climate is if we are to find faster, more equitable solutions to address the climate crisis. By bringing together a network of endorsers and galvanizing the academic library community, the Open Climate Campaign launched, or supported the launch of,  proactive and lasting initiatives to increase access to climate research. Read more about some of the successful projects from the Campaign that are continuing at CC below.

The Paper Pledge for the Planet: Open repositories can be a tool for climate action. This year CC launched an initiative encouraging authors to upload a version of your work, as agreed within the terms of your publishing agreement, to an open repository. Authors can check at Share Your Paper what version you can upload and even directly email the permitted version right on the same website. We are also partnering with the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) and EIFL for direct outreach to researchers through academic and national institutions.  

Unbinding: About 40% of papers cited in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report are behind a paywall. That means that some of the world’s most important research on climate change is inaccessible. We are directly appealing to publishers to open up the papers. As partners CC will provide the data and information about this key literature and celebrate publishers participation and contribution to addressing climate change. 

Taking action to increase the availability of access to climate research is collective climate action. The more we can collectively work together to ensure that all climate research is available as open access as the default, the more we will collectively be able to do to address the climate crisis.  We are actively seeking partnerships and funding to continue this work. If this resonates, please reach out. 

Supporting Policy Development to Advance Open Science

CC actively develops and contributes to open science and access policies with funders, institutions, national governments and international bodies. This year we worked with over 10 countries developing, consulting and aiding in the implementation of open access policies including Morocco who recently announced their national strategy for open educational resources and open science

Increasing the Accessibility and Reusability of Preprints

CC and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are collaborating to promote the use of the CC BY 4.0 license on preprints (otherwise known as the versions of research manuscripts that are published before undergoing formal peer review). Openly licensing preprints enables researchers and readers to benefit from rapid dissemination, rigorous review, and equitable contribution to scientific knowledge that doesn’t require paid access to exclusive research journals. As part of our Open Preprints project, we develop and share practical licensing guidance for researchers in the life sciences, as well as make policy recommendations for funders and preprint servers.

We meet regularly with arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and Research Square, and other preprint servers to help streamline their open licensing practices in standard alignment with each other. We’re also engaging funders of open science to develop model policies aimed at increasing the adoption of CC BY licenses on preprints and ensure that grant-funded research outputs are accessible, adaptable, and aligned with the growing demand for transparency and collaboration in scientific communication. This  year CC developed a series of resources to help preprint authors, librarians, preprint servers, and others in the scholarly communication space adopt CC By licences for preprints. 

Coming up in 2025

We look forward to engaging and connecting with researchers, funders, data organizations, preprint servers, and other stakeholders through our workshops, events and projects in 2025. You can find out more information about how to get involved in our work on CC’s new Open Science website. You can also join one of our upcoming Open Climate Community Calls in partnership with the Open Environmental Data Project or join our Open Goes COP Collation working to raise awareness of open at the UNFCC’s Conference of the Parties.   

Contact us at info@creativecommons.org for more information or to work with us. 

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From Recommendations to Implementation: Increasing Access to Climate Data for Earth Intelligence https://creativecommons.org/2024/12/05/from-recommendations-to-implementation-increasing-access-to-climate-data-for-earth-intelligence/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=from-recommendations-to-implementation-increasing-access-to-climate-data-for-earth-intelligence Thu, 05 Dec 2024 15:32:56 +0000 https://creativecommons.org/?p=75652 Screenshot by Creative Commons is licensed under CC BY 4.0. 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…

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Screenshot by Creative Commons is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

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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CC Supports a new Digital Knowledge Act for Europe https://creativecommons.org/2024/02/12/cc-supports-a-new-digital-knowledge-act-for-europe/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cc-supports-a-new-digital-knowledge-act-for-europe Mon, 12 Feb 2024 04:57:48 +0000 https://creativecommons.org/?p=74685 Anonymous, “Prudence, Wisdom and Knowledge”, National Library of the Netherlands, Public Domain Mark.  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…

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A medieval manuscript representing three richly-clad women in front of a green, hilly landscape with castles in the background.
Anonymous, “Prudence, Wisdom and Knowledge”, National Library of the Netherlands, Public Domain Mark. 

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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Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Funds New Project to Openly License Life Sciences Preprints https://creativecommons.org/2023/10/04/chan-zuckerberg-initiative-funds-new-project-to-openly-license-life-sciences-preprints/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=chan-zuckerberg-initiative-funds-new-project-to-openly-license-life-sciences-preprints Wed, 04 Oct 2023 19:42:06 +0000 https://creativecommons.org/?p=73940 Creative Commons is excited to announce new programmatic support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to help make openly licensed preprints the primary vehicle of scientific dissemination.

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A black Chan Zuckerberg Initiative wordmark and red “cz” logo next to a black Creative Commons logo.
CZI brand marks used by permission from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

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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A Tale of Two Global Challenges: Climate research is not as open as COVID-19 research https://creativecommons.org/2023/09/06/a-tale-of-two-global-challenges-climate-research-is-not-as-open-as-covid-19-research/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-tale-of-two-global-challenges-climate-research-is-not-as-open-as-covid-19-research Wed, 06 Sep 2023 15:44:10 +0000 https://creativecommons.org/?p=67825 In early 2020, something unusual happened in the academic community. A normally guarded community accustomed to holding their data and research papers close, began to adopt much more open practices. Researchers came in droves to preprint servers to post versions of their research papers – that had not yet been peer reviewed – to make…

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Two charts next to each other, one shows the percentage of open access for SDG-related research and the other shows the percentage of open access for COVID-related research papers. The charts show that there is significantly more open access to COVID-related research.

Percentage of open access for SDG-related (left) and COVID-related (right) research papers, by open access type, 2000-2021. Much more COVID-19 research relative to SDG-related research is open access. Image from Contrasting the open access dissemination of COVID-19 and SDG research, Vincent Larivière, Isabel Basson, Jocalyn P. Clark. bioRxiv 2023.05.18.541286

In early 2020, something unusual happened in the academic community. A normally guarded community accustomed to holding their data and research papers close, began to adopt much more open practices. Researchers came in droves to preprint servers to post versions of their research papers – that had not yet been peer reviewed – to make their work freely and publicly available. New data repositories emerged and pledges (Wellcome, Chief Science Advisors) to make research open were signed. This demonstrable change in behavior was due to the recognition, including public and political pressure, that COVID-19 was a global threat to humanity. Biologists, geneticists, statisticians and others in biomedical fields came together to share their work; they realized in order to develop COVID-19 treatments and vaccines, the knowledge about the virus needed to be open and shared rapidly.

We now know over 90,000 preprints¹ have been posted to various preprint servers since January 2020 and a new preprint by Lariviére et al. (2023) found that 79.9% of COVID-19 papers between January 2020² and December 2021 are open access. So if researchers recognized and responded to the need for rapid, open access to COVID-19 research, what about other global challenges?

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are effectively 17 global challenges “for peace and prosperity for people and the planet.” Many of the world’s greatest challenges can be encapsulated in the SDGs. Lariviére et al. found that unlike COVID-19, only 55% of papers relating to one or more SDGs were open access for the same period or put another way, 45% of all research applicable to tackling humanity’s greatest challenges is closed. Research on climate change, arguably one of the world’s greatest challenges, had the second-lowest level of open access at just 55.5%. The contrast between open access of COVID-19 and climate research suggests that a sense of urgency and importance is elicited in one crisis but not the other. Why the disconnect?

It’s possible that publishers and climate researchers are simply subject to the many pressures and incentives against open access and that climate change research, while widely considered important, does not match the level of awareness, global solidarity and disruption that COVID-19 had on the world. In reality, climate change is an even bigger threat to humanity and is deserving of a higher sense of urgency.

The Open Climate Campaign is a response to this lack of urgency and is working to make the open sharing of research the norm in climate science through global advocacy, one-on-one work with funders, national governments and environmental organizations; and partnerships with open projects and publishers. The Campaign recognizes that in order to generate solutions and mitigations to climate change, the knowledge (research papers, data, educational resources) about it must be open.

We are living through a climate crisis and a very real, effective action we can take is to make climate change research accessible. On our website you can find action kits detailing tools on what you can do to open climate research and how you can work with the Open Climate Campaign. Join us at openclimatecampaign.org or reach out at contact@openclimatecampaign.org.

¹ A preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preprint)

² https://github.com/nicholasmfraser/covid19_preprints

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2023: The Year of Open Science https://creativecommons.org/2023/01/17/2023-the-year-of-open-science/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=2023-the-year-of-open-science Tue, 17 Jan 2023 21:06:57 +0000 https://creativecommons.org/?p=66342 2023 is the year of the rabbit in the Chinese Lunar calendar, the year Voyager 2 is predicted to overtake Pioneer 10 as the second-farthest spacecraft from Earth, and the Year of Open Science. In an announcement by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), 2023 was declared the Year of Open…

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2023 is the year of the rabbit in the Chinese Lunar calendar, the year Voyager 2 is predicted to overtake Pioneer 10 as the second-farthest spacecraft from Earth, and the Year of Open Science. In an announcement by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), 2023 was declared the Year of Open Science, along with new actions to advance open and equitable research. Creative Commons (CC) congratulates everyone involved in these momentous announcements, which promise to advance open science in the US federal government and bring new investments in open access research. A list of the participating agencies, as well as updates on the initiative, can be found at the newly created open.science.gov

2023 will also be a memorable year for CC and the Open Climate Campaign, as we embark on working with national governments, funders and environmental organizations to create, adopt and implement open access policies to promote better sharing of climate change and biodiversity knowledge. We were thrilled to see OSTP emphasize values core to our better sharing strategy at CC: “The principle and practice of making research products and processes available to all, while respecting diverse cultures, maintaining security and privacy, and fostering collaborations, reproducibility, and equity.” CC looks forward to building on our involvement in NASA’s TOPS Community Panel, and to forge new connections and provide direct support on best practices for open licensing requirements, as US federal agencies and departments update their public open access plans per OSTP’s new guidance.

We are excited to work with additional national governments looking to emulate these leaps forward in making publicly funded knowledge openly licensed and accessible for the common good. If you are looking to join the ranks of countries like the Government of Ukraine, which recently approved its National Open Science Action Plan, France and others, please contact us. We are happy to help.

To learn more about the Open Climate Campaign or to connect, please visit the Open Climate Campaign website.

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Patrick J. McGovern Foundation Funds New CC Initiative to Open Large Climate Datasets https://creativecommons.org/2022/12/19/patrick-j-mcgovern-foundation-funds-new-cc-initiative-to-open-large-climate-datasets/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=patrick-j-mcgovern-foundation-funds-new-cc-initiative-to-open-large-climate-datasets Mon, 19 Dec 2022 21:36:02 +0000 https://creativecommons.org/?p=66227 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…

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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.

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CC at UN #GlobalGoalsWeek 2022 https://creativecommons.org/2022/09/17/cc-at-un-globalgoalsweek-2022/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cc-at-un-globalgoalsweek-2022 Sat, 17 Sep 2022 12:00:42 +0000 https://creativecommons.org/?p=65881 Want to build a fairer, more peaceful world? Creative Commons does and we are joining over 170 other organizations in New York City during 16–25 September to accelerate progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) during 2022 #GlobalGoalsWeek. CC’s deep engagement with the SDGs comes from two of our fundamental beliefs: First, that…

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Want to build a fairer, more peaceful world? Creative Commons does and we are joining over 170 other organizations in New York City during 16–25 September to accelerate progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) during 2022 #GlobalGoalsWeek.

CC’s deep engagement with the SDGs comes from two of our fundamental beliefs: First, that the 17 SDGs identify the world’s biggest challenges, enabling us all to focus where we need to ensure a better future for all. And second, that we believe addressing these challenges requires that knowledge and culture about them need to be  open and accessible to all so we can solve them. When knowledge and culture are not freely and openly available, only part of humanity is able to learn about and contribute to solutions.

Opening knowledge and culture requires not only robust legal infrastructure for sharing — like CC’s open licenses and CC0 public domain dedication — but also intentional practices to support what we call better sharing:

  • Sharing that is inclusive, just and equitable — where everyone has wide opportunity to access content, to contribute their own creativity, and to receive recognition and rewards for their contributions.
  • Sharing that is reciprocal — where we rebalance the skewed world we live in now in which a few produce and profit from works that the many consume.
  • Sharing that is sustainable — where open participation in the public commons is the default rather than the exception.

Connect with CC in NYC During #GlobalGoalsWeek

Headshot of Catherine Stihler, wearing a blue shawl standing in outside.

“Catherine Stihler” by Martin Shields is licensed under CC BY 4.0

On Friday 23 Sep, CC CEO Catherine Stihler Catherine will join Brewster Kahle, Founder & Digital Librarian at the Internet Archive and Christopher Lewis, President and CEO at Public Knowledge to lead a workshop at Unfinished Live: Want A Better World? Build A Better Internet, in an informal and intimate conversation about why they are initiating “a movement for a better internet,” and the public interest values that drive their work. Catherine is also a panelist on Tuesday, 20 Sep on Forging a More Equitable Internet hosted by the Global Blockchain Business Council as part of Blockchain Central UNGA, and is a panelist on Wednesday 21 Sep on Incorporating Principles of Sustainability in the Future of Work hosted by the Business Council for International Understanding.

“Dr. Cable Green” by Sebastiaan ter Burg is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Dr. Cable Green, CC’s Director of Open Knowledge will be attending UN meetings on Saturday 17 September: Effective Educational Ecosystems: Solutions for Open Digital Content (1:30–2:30pm ET livestream) and Transforming Education for Sustainable Development: Implementing the UNESCO OER Recommendation within Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships (4:30–6:30pm ET livestream). Cable will also be attending additional meetings during the week, including the Ministerial Panel Transforming education for prosperity, people and the planet, the SDSN Leadership Council session Tech Innovation for Education and Training, and The Brookings Institution symposium Promises and perils of using new technologies to access, document, and credential learning in the digital age.

Engage with CC to Open Up Your Organization with Better Sharing

We hope to connect with many people during GlobalGoalsWeek and all related events, but we know not everyone will be able to attend in person and everyone will be looking for ways to build on the energy and ideas generated by these extraordinary gatherings. We invite you to connect with CC more deeply to bring open and better sharing into your community and work.

Looking for experts to speak on Creative Commons, open tools and practices, and better sharing? CC staff and community members are available to engage with your community and bring their expertise and experience to your organization, topics, and goals. Tell us more about your event >

Need help bringing the power of openness to meet Sustainable Development Goals? CC works with organizations and governments all over the world to help them integrate tools and practices for open and better sharing into their work to meet the SDGs. Start a conversation with CC >

Is your organization part of the Creative Commons Global Network? Join over 60 organizations from around the world who are dedicated to building the open commons and promoting better sharing in knowledge and culture. Contact us to learn more about our global network >

Want to build your expertise in open practices? The CC Certificate program offers in-depth courses about CC licenses, open practices, and the ethos of sharing in our global, digital commons in three tracks: for educators, for academic librarians, and for professionals working in open culture and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums). Certificate cohorts start on a rolling basis >

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A Big Win for Open Access: United States Mandates All Publicly Funded Research Be Freely Available with No Embargo https://creativecommons.org/2022/08/26/a-big-win-for-open-access/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-big-win-for-open-access Fri, 26 Aug 2022 13:00:57 +0000 https://creativecommons.org/?p=65747 Today the United States White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued dramatic guidance to all US federal agencies: update all policies to require that all federally funded research and data is available for the public to freely access and re-use “in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication.” Creative Commons…

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Today the United States White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued dramatic guidance to all US federal agencies: update all policies to require that all federally funded research and data is available for the public to freely access and re-use “in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication.”

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.

An orange open padlock icon sandwiched by the words open and access.

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 / 23).

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.

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UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science Ratified https://creativecommons.org/2021/12/02/unesco-recommendation-on-open-science-ratified/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=unesco-recommendation-on-open-science-ratified Thu, 02 Dec 2021 17:56:10 +0000 https://creativecommons.org/?p=64344 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…

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UNESCO Open Science (circle)

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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