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

The post Press Release: New Four-Year, $4 Million Open Climate Campaign Will Open Knowledge to Solve Challenges in Climate and Biodiversity appeared first on Creative Commons.

Partners with Noun Project and Teespring to design and sell exclusive t-shirt celebrating “CC” logo acquisition by MoMA; Proceeds to support Creative Commons

SAN FRANCISCO – MARCH 25, 2015 – Creative Commons has partnered with crowdsourced visual dictionary Noun Project and commerce platform Teespring to release a custom t-shirt celebrating the “CC” logo’s acquisition into the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. The special edition t-shirt will be available for a limited time only. Proceeds will benefit Creative Commons to further their work in growing and protecting the commons.

Designed by the Noun Project, the commemorative t-shirt celebrates the lasting impact and international recognition of the Creative Commons “double-c in a circle” or “CC” logo. The logo, originally designed for Creative Commons in 2002 by designer Ryan Junell, is recognized as the global standard for creative sharing, remixing, and reuse. Creators, educators, and remixers use the logo to indicate their adoption of one or more variants of the Creative Commons license.

In March 2015 MoMA recognized the ubiquity and significance of the Creative Commons logo by including it in their permanent design collection. The logo can be viewed alongside other imminently recognizably marks such as the @ and recycling symbols as part of the MoMA exhibit “This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good,” organized by senior curator, Paola Antonelli.

“On behalf of the global Creative Commons community I want to thank Teespring and Noun Project for launching this collaboration to celebrate our beloved CC logo,” said Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley. “This commemorative design is a beautiful remix that represents what Creative Commons is all about: Noun Project’s freely reusable iconography depicting a range of sharing and remixing activities within the Commons. We know fans of Creative Commons will wear it with pride.”

Noun Project, a long-time supporter and proponent of Creative Commons, designed the limited edition t-shirt to celebrate this milestone using pictograms uploaded by their community. Each pictogram in the design represents an industry or type of media influenced by Creative Commons, which encompasses fields as broad as the arts, science, medicine, and law.

“When opening our platform to submissions from creatives around the world, we knew we wanted to offer a clear and easy license that would enable anyone to share their work. Creative Commons was the perfect solution for helping us build and share the world’s visual language,” said Sofya Polyakov, CEO and Co-Founder of the Noun Project.

To bring this special edition t-shirt to life, Creative Commons and Noun Project have partnered with Teespring, the leading commerce platform for custom apparel. Launched in 2012, Teespring empowers entrepreneurs, creatives, influencers, and nonprofits to create and sell high­-quality products people love, with no cost or risk.

“At Teespring we strive to remove the barriers to bringing great ideas to market, which is why we have a unique respect and admiration for Creative Commons and the impact they’ve made for creators all over the world,” said Teespring Co-Founder and CEO, Walker Williams. “It’s an honor for us to partner with Creative Commons and Noun Project and help the community show their support for this meaningful cause and movement.”

This special edition Creative Commons tee will be available until April 8, 2015 at www.teespring.com/creativecommons.

You can read more about the history and origin of the Creative Commons logo at https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/45228.

Image assets can also be downloaded via zip file.

Press contacts

Creative Commons
press@creativecommons.org

Noun Project
info@thenounproject.com

Teespring
press@teespring.com

About Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a globally-focused nonprofit organization dedicated to making it easier for people to share their creative works, and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. Creative Commons provides free licenses and other legal tools to give individuals and organizations a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative work, ensure proper attribution, and allow others to copy, distribute, and make use of those works. There are nearly 1 billion licensed works, hosted on some of the most popular content platforms in the world, and over 9 million individual websites.

About Noun Project
Noun Project is a crowdsourced visual dictionary of over 100,000 pictograms anyone can download and use. Their goal is to help people communicate ideas visually by building the world’s best resource for visual language.

About Teespring
Teespring is a commerce platform that enables anyone to create and sell products that people love, with no cost or risk. Teespring powers all aspects of bringing merchandise to life from production and manufacturing to supply chain, logistics, and customer service. By unlocking commerce for everyone, Teespring is creating new opportunities for entrepreneurs, influencers, community organizers, and anyone who rallies communities around specific causes or passions.

The post Press release: Creative Commons Launches Special Edition Commemorative Tee appeared first on Creative Commons.

Cape Town, January 22nd, 2008—A coalition of educators, foundations, and internet pioneers today urged governments and publishers to make publicly-funded educational materials available freely over the internet.

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, launched today, is part of a dynamic effort to make learning and teaching materials available to everyone online, regardless of income or geographic location. It encourages teachers and students around the world to join a growing movement and use the web to share, remix and translate classroom materials to make education more accessible, effective, and flexible.

“Open education allows every person on earth to access and contribute to the vast pool of knowledge on the web,” said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia and one of the authors of the Declaration. “Everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn.”

According to the Declaration, teachers, students and communities would benefit if publishers and governments made publicly-funded educational materials freely available online. This will give students unlimited access to high quality, constantly improving course materials, just as Wikipedia has done in the world of reference materials.

Open education makes the link between teaching, learning and the collaborative culture of the Internet. It includes creating and sharing materials used in teaching as well as new approaches to learning where people create and shape knowledge together. These new practices promise to provide students with educational materials that are individually tailored to their learning style. There are already over 100,000 such open educational resources available on the Internet.

The Declaration is the result of a meeting of thirty open education leaders in Cape Town, South Africa, organized late last year by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation. Participants identified key strategies for developing open education. They encourage others to join and sign the Declaration.

“Open sourcing education doesn’t just make learning more accessible, it makes it more collaborative, flexible and locally relevant,” said Linux Entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, who also recorded a video press briefing (http://capetowndeclaration.blip.tv/). “Linux is succeeding exactly because of this sort of adaptability. The same kind of success is possible for open education.”

Open education is of particular relevance in developing and emerging economies, creating the potential for affordable textbooks and learning materials. It opens the door to small-scale, local content producers likely to create more diverse offerings than large multinational publishing houses.

“Cultural diversity and local knowledge are a critical part of open education,” said Eve Gray of the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town. “Countries like South Africa need to start producing and sharing educational materials built on their own diverse cultural heritage. Open education promises to make this kind of diverse publishing possible.”

The Declaration has already been translated into over a dozen languages and the growing list of signatories includes: Jimmy Wales; Mark Shuttleworth; Peter Gabriel, musician and founder of Real World Studios; Sir John Daniel, President of Commonwealth of Learning; Thomas Alexander, former Director for Education at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; Paul N. Courant, University Librarian and former Provost, University of Michigan; Lawrence Lessig, founder and CEO of Creative Commons; Andrey Kortunov, President of the New Eurasia Foundation; and Yehuda Elkana, Rector of the Central European University. Organizations endorsing the Declaration include: Wikimedia Foundation; Public Library of Science; Commonwealth of Learning; Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition; Canonical Ltd.; Centre for Open and Sustainable Learning; Open Society Institute; and Shuttleworth Foundation.

To read or sign the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, please visit: http://www.capetowndeclaration.org.

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