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. 

• Why Use the CC BY License for Preprints? 
• How the CC BY License for Preprints Impacts Journal Publication
• Webinar: How to Choose a License to Amplify the Impact of your Preprint – hosted by arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and Creative Commons 

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. 

The post CC Open Science: 2024 Year in Review appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Open Education program at Creative Commons works to support CC’s mission through education, advocacy, and outreach on using open licenses and open licensing policies to maximize the benefits of open education (content, practices and policy). We work closely with governments, educational institutions and organizations to open up knowledge for everyone. As we explore new solutions for sharing in 2025 and the years to come, we want to take a moment to reflect back on some of our work in 2024.

• We completed working with Carnegie Math Pathways at WestEd to openly license their Quantway and Statway courses.
• Attended the Hewlett Education Grantee Conference in Atlanta; and delivered keynotes at:
  • the California OER Conference on shifting to community owned and operated open knowledge
  • the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies Library and the Ukrainian Library Association, series “Open Knowledge in Ukrainian Universities: Open Educational Resources”
  • the Arizona Regional OER Conference, titled “In Cyborg Luddite Solidarity.” 
• We were interviewed for the Open Education Global Open Education Voices Podcast. 
• We hosted multiple webinars, workshops and panels for open education including: “Wikidata, OER, and Curriculum Alignment in Ghana, Uruguay and Italy (Recordings English and Español), as well as two workshops entitled “Open Education Platform: Cease and Desist Letters.” 
• CC officially joined the Digital Public Goods Alliance in March of this year, and now the CC legal tools are formally recognized as part of the Digital Public Goods Registry. This is critical for underscoring the public interest benefit of the legal infrastructure of open sharing. In November, CC attended the DPGA Annual Members Meeting in Singapore (program). We led three sessions at the meeting including: Fully Open Public Interest AI with Open Data, DPGs are a Prerequisite to Solve Climate Change (slides), and National Open Licensing Policies for DPGs. The DPGA CEO particularly liked our “open procurement” phrase: “buy what you need, own what you buy, share what you own.” 
• We also participated in the 3rd UNESCO World OER Congress (program / concept note) in Dubai in November.
  • Our CEO Anna Tumadóttir discussed the “Role of Open Licensing in the Future of Education” (slides); Cable Green talked about the importance of open licensing and open policy in the “Global Digital Commons: The UNESCO / UNSDSN OER Overlay Repository;” and Jennryn Wetzler and Cable were rapporteurs for two sessions: “Privacy and Data Protection of Openly Licensed Content” and “Policies Mapping Open Solution Ecosystems” respectively. Lastly, we participated in the UNESCO Dynamic OER Coalition meeting to make final recommendations on the Dubai Declaration on OER – the outcome document of the Congress.

Notably, the CC Open Education Community had several accomplishments across various projects (more on this soon). We invite you to join us there!

In 2025, CC will be working with the DPGA as they explore: open source first (in government decisions), financing for DPGs to enable digital public infrastructure (DPI), DPGs for open data at scale, and high quality earth observation DPGs for climate change. We will also be conducting open education AI consultations to understand the concerns of educators whose work is being used to train AI and how educators are using AI. Additionally, we will work with the UNESCO OER Dynamic Coalition and the Network of NGOs to help national governments implement the UNESCO Recommendation on OER. 

If you’d like to connect with us about Open Education, please reach out to info@creativecommons.org.

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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.

The post From Recommendations to Implementation: Increasing Access to Climate Data for Earth Intelligence appeared first on Creative Commons.

In this interview, we were delighted to speak with Hanae Lrhoul, a graduate of the CC Certificate for Educators. 

Hanae works as a professor at the Information Sciences school in Rabat, Morocco. Her main research topics are related to open access, scientometrics, and data visualization. She is also an associate editor of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the CC Morocco chapter lead, and Vice President of the International Association of Francophone Libraries (AIFBD).

Q: What inspired you to take the CC Certificate for Educators?

Q: You’re a professor in the school of information science. How has what you learned in the CC Certificate course informed your work?

Q: I understand that you’re an integral part of the CC Morocco team and helped establish that chapter back in 2020/2021. Can you tell us more about the state of open access and CC licenses in Morocco?

Q: I also know you’ve done some interesting work with the government – for example, you recently told me that the Ministry of Higher Education launched the first open science project as part of the Minister’s ESRI pact.

Q: What advice do you have for folks who are new to open science or open education initiatives and are looking to get more involved?

Q: Final words?

CC Certificate Alumni Interview with Hanae Lrhoul by Shanna Hollich is licensed via CC BY 4.0.

Registering for the CC Certificate program is one way to start taking Hanae’s wonderful advice to “adopt and embrace open access.” To learn more about our upcoming courses, please visit the CC Certificate website. Or, read about how our alumni have used the Certificate course knowledge in a number of ways, including: developing a microcredential course about open educational resources, an Open Syllabus project, supporting the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science; an open access policy for a cultural heritage institution working with digitized art works; open licensed content for a bachelor of business program in Bangladesh and Masters courses in the US. You can also read alumni testimonials here.  

If you are a CC Certificate alum and would like to share your amazing work with our CC community, please reach out to us at certificates AT creativecommons DOT org.

The post CC Certificate Alumni Making a Global Impact appeared first on Creative Commons.

“Together We Can Move Mountains” by Steve McCarthy for Fine Acts x OBI is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

CC lauds all of the open education community efforts, and we look forward to sharing additional highlights at the end of this year.  The CC Open Education Platform funded projects include:

V Simpósio de RPG, Larp e Educação. The project will organize a symposium about tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) and live action roleplaying (LARPs) on Human Rights Education, to be held remotely in Brazil in June 2024. The event will happen during 8 days with lectures, workshops and talks. Participants will be able to interact live with the speakers as the lectures are streamed, and all the recordings are going to be openly available after the event. The lecturers are also being invited to produce and send hands-on written digital materials detailing the instructions of the activity presented, and those are going to be compiled on an openly available digital book. Some of the lectures will approach how TTRPGs and LARPs can be used as tools to facilitate the inclusion and discussion of human rights in educational activities. After the event all of the produced material (videos and written content) will be openly available under CC-BY licenses. 
Country: Brazil
Project Lead: Marcos Vinícius Carneiro Vital

An Open Education Club and OER for Climate Education in High Schools. The project will create awareness of OER in 20 High schools, introduce High School Students to the wide array of opportunities in OER and then use it as a tool for climate and environmental education.  The project will organize special sessions on Open Education, form an Open Education club and then train club members on how to use OER for climate education and to build capacity for climate action (SDG 13). 
Country: Ghana
Project Lead: Otuo-Akyampong Boakye

Empowering Librarians: Enhancing OER Awareness in Ghana’s Tertiary Schools. This project will raise awareness and utilization of Open Educational Resources (OER) among librarians, faculty, and students. The project will offer training on open licensing, co-creating curated collections of OER materials, as well as building partnership and advocacy, in order to empower librarians to effectively integrate OER into their institutions. 
Country: Ghana
Project Lead: Stephen Dakyi

Open Education Initiative in Nepal. This project will establish an Open Education Initiative to enhance access to quality educational resources for all learners in Nepal, regardless of their location or socioeconomic background. The key components include using a centralized online platform, training educators on OER, promoting community outreach, investing in digital infrastructure, and advocating for policies promoting open education practices. The implementation plan includes a pilot phase, scaling up, and integration and sustainability. CC Nepal and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (Government of Nepal) will collaborate together on this project. 
Country: Nepal
Project Lead: Roshan Kumar Karn

Open Educational Resources for Yoruba Culture. This project will create a set of OER centered on the rich and diverse culture of the Yoruba people — one of Africa’s major ethnic groups, predominantly found in Nigeria, Benin and Togo. Through a series of video episodes, learners will be able to explore elements of Yoruba culture such as the language, food, music, festivals and names, and more. 
Country: Nigeria
Project Lead: Isaac Oloruntimilehin

Supporting the UNESCO OER Recommendation 
In addition to the five winning projects, CC and community members will continue to work closely with UNESCO on refining media “explainers,” about open licenses and their importance for global open education.  Once video editing, graphics and translations are complete, we look forward to publishing them. 

If you would like to get involved in CC’s open education community and activities, join us! Contact jennryn [at] creativecommons.org for more details. 

The post The CC Open Education Platform Funds Five New Community Projects appeared first on Creative Commons.

Wikimania 2024 is the biggest meeting of open movement activists and organizations this year. It offers a rare occasion for activists to meet in person. We are making use of this opportunity to bring together those working in the field of Openness, Free Knowledge, and the Digital Commons to talk about shared advocacy strategies: the political challenges of Knowledge Commons. We are counting on the participation of people already planning to attend Wikimania, and those who will come especially to attend our side event. We are expecting around 70 people to join our event.

Our goal is to establish relationships needed to design a shared advocacy vision that over time can result in stronger, collaborative advocacy work. To this end, the event will focus on three topics: 1) Legal and Policy issues, 2) Communication and Global Campaigns, and 3) Community activation and Sustainability.

Are you planning to attend Wikimania and interested in joining us for this event? Please fill out this interest form.

There are few opportunities to bring together the movement’s most engaged participants and discuss shared strategies for advocacy and ways of moving forward together. Wikimania’s 2024 motto is “Collaboration of the Open.” Our one-day side event to Wikimania is an opportunity to bring this motto to life.

The post Join us at Common(s) Cause: Towards a shared advocacy strategy for the Knowledge Commons – a side event to Wikimania 2024 appeared first on Creative Commons.

If the embedded timeline above is not working, the highlights are also listed below.

What’s next

In the coming months, we  look forward to co-developing a public folder of CC training materials with CC communities around the world. Stay tuned for more information and how to get involved. 

Meanwhile: would you like a CC training at your institution or community of practice? Learn more on our website and email learning [at] creativecommons.org for more information. We’d be delighted to help you continue to grow your knowledge of Creative Commons licensing and the open movement.

Timeline text

• 9 January: CC provided a short overview of OER and CC licenses as tools to support education and science in Ukraine. This was presented for Ukrainian conference “Open Knowledge in Ukrainian Universities: Open Educational Resources.” Recording available on YouTube.
• 20 January: At the 2024 ALA LibLearnX conference in January, CC presented: “3D Scanning for Cultural Heritage Institutions: Practical Skills and Considerations for Library Preservation.” In this hands-on workshop, participants learned the basics of how 3D scanning works and the importance of this technology for preserving cultural heritage and library collections. After a quick demonstration, we were able to dive into a deeper discussion about the copyright and open licensing considerations of this particular type of digital preservation.
• 26 February: CC provided a general CC licensing training for CC network colleagues in Rwanda. We thoroughly enjoy supporting CC network colleagues and are happy to provide one-hour trainings like this upon request.
• 29 February: In a keynote, titled “In Cyborg Luddite Solidarity,” we explored the challenges and promises generative AI poses for creators and open educators. From concerns around privacy, consent, bias, economic and environmental impacts, access to and control over technology further entrenching inequities, copyright, misinformation and more, generative AI remains a contentious advancement. Simultaneously, the benefits and promises witnessed in 2023 alone were awe-inspiring. AI advanced life-saving medical knowledge, enhanced educational curriculum alignment across national borders, and made creative expression more accessible to untrained creators. Using generative AI, international projects strengthened linguistic diversity online — work vital to addressing one of the major inequities of the internet. While our new landscape continues to evolve, we drew from the Luddite Movement and Cyborg Manifesto to highlight ethics from our collective pasts that may apply today.
• Between 4 and 8 March, we celebrated Open Education Week with a range of learning offerings.
• 4 March: In Affordable Learning Kentucky’s virtual OE week symposium, CC delivered a talk titled “OER and Social Justice: Are We Keeping Our Promises?” We were grateful to engage with a new audience about the OER and its potential for even greater accessibility and social justice to empower learners from all facets of society. 
• 4 March: This Licensing Q&A webinar was part of the Creative Commons Certificate courses, and was available to the public. Meredith Jacob is the CC US Public Lead and Director of the Project on Copyright and Open Licensing at the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University Washington College of Law.
• 5 March: CC hosted a webinar focused on Wikidata, OER, and curriculum alignment in Ghana, Uruguay, and Italy, with special guests Nat Hernández Clavijo and Sailesh Patnaik. Clavijo and Patnaik shared the transformative potential of Wikidata in curriculum alignment through a review of Wikidata for Education, a project born in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana, in collaboration with UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition. The project aligned Wikipedia articles with school curricula, revolutionizing the way students access relevant information, and has since expanded to Uruguay and Italy. Recording link (English); Recording link (Español)
• 6 March: CC provided a training day in prep for Missouri’s A&OER Conference. Training days are great opportunities to ensure large groups have a baseline understanding of CC licenses, open practices, and open advocacy efforts. 
• 7 March: In celebration of Open Education Week, OE Global’s Alan Levine interviewed CC Director of Learning and Training, Jennryn Wetzler. The podcast will be available on the OEGlobal Voices podcast page.
• 8 March: This Q&A webinar included an overview of CC’s recently released Recommended Best Practices for Better Sharing of Climate Data and the CC licenses and tools that support best practices. Our recommendations are a result of collaboration between Creative Commons, government agencies, and intergovernmental organizations including ECMWF, NASA, NOAA, and the World Resources Institute. They mark a significant milestone in our ongoing effort to enhance the accessibility, sharing, and reuse of open climate data to address the climate crisis. Our goal is to share strategies that align with existing data sharing principles and pave the way for a more interconnected and accessible future for climate data. These recommendations also align with the strategies and outcomes of the Open Climate Campaign, a partnership between Creative Commons, SPARC, and EIFL.
• 12 March: This Licensing Q&A webinar with CC General Counsel Kat Walsh was part of the Creative Commons Certificate courses, and was available to the public. 
• 12 March – 2 April: CC piloted a series of webinars with ALA’s Core division about copyright, Creative Commons licensing, and the potential impact of emerging technologies on copyright and open access. Recording links are forthcoming.
• 21 March: This informational webinar was part of the Creative Commons Certificate courses, and was available to the public. Nancy Olson, Director of Distance Education and Instructional Technology at Barstow College provided practical guidance on Accessible OER.
• 5 April: CC co-presented a session at the Northeast OER Summit titled “Beyond Affordability: Collaboration, Reuse, Translation and Localization of OER in Ukraine.” Through storytelling of a recent event in 2023, Ukrainian colleagues and CC demonstrate the power of OER as a tool for cross country collaboration, connection and as support for learning communities in Ukraine. Presenters invited participants to join their collective story, exploring ways to support Ukrainian colleagues translating and localizing needed skills training amidst war.
• 17 April: Creative Commons announced the launch of “Introduction to Open Educational Resources,” our first professional development microcredential course and partnership with the University of Nebraska at Omaha, commencing on 31 May.

The post Learn More with Creative Commons: Recent Training Highlights appeared first on Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is proud to announce the launch of “Introduction to Open Educational Resources,” our first professional development microcredential course and partnership with the University of Nebraska at Omaha, commencing on 31 May.

This microcredential pilot started with one CC Certificate alumnus’s enthusiasm for open education. Craig Finlay, OER and STEM Librarian at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) Libraries, took the CC Certificate course for Academic Librarians in September, 2021. Since then, he’s advocated for open education in a variety of capacities: managing UNO’s biannual campus Affordable Content Grants, which largely fund converting courses from using all traditional textbooks to using at least one open educational resource; hosting regular CC workshops for faculty on campus; and co-authoring a white paper exploring OER’s positive impact on student success. Co-creating the microcredential course offered the next step in applying his CC Certificate expertise and passion for open education. Craig was intent on bringing CC licensing expertise to more learners, seeking professional development, and UNO granted a pathway for this.

Over the course of the last several months, CC and UNO have developed the “Introduction to Open Educational Resources.” The course remixes Certificate lessons in open licensing, copyright, open education, fair use and the public domain.  Content targets the ecosystem of scholarly and academic publishing and explores growing and managing open education efforts in these domains. Learners enrolling in this 9-week course will engage asynchronously, but should expect to work five hours per week to complete course work; successful completion will result in a microcredential for non-credit and professional education. 

Beyond the course announcement, we wanted to share a few crucial elements that made this partnership successful: 

• A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which outlined the goal, key roles, responsibilities and timeline for our work. 
• A mutually viable financial model, which ensures this work can be sustainable for both institutions. 
• Adaptability. Because this project involved multiple stakeholders, we needed to remain flexible to meet differing needs. 
• Trust. Working together has been easy because of our basis in trust.

We share these key ingredients to this microcredential pilot because we expect the partnership can be replicated for a number of new communities. If you work at an institution and are interested in partnering with CC on a microcredential course related to CC Certificate course content, please contact certificates [at] creativecommons.org.

Note: The CC Certificate program was created as an investment in our open advocates around the world. CC built the training to strengthen the global communities’ work engaging in open movements in education, access and more recently, cultural heritage. 

CC Certificate courses develop peoples’ practical expertise in open licensing, copyright, and ways to engage in open knowledge and culture movements. The program has certified over 1700 people in 65 countries with open licensing expertise. Through open licensing course content, CC supports communities making derivatives of the course, from Masters level courses, faculty workshops, an audio recording, to nine language translations, and more. 

The post Creative Commons and University of Nebraska at Omaha Partner on a Microcredential Course appeared first on Creative Commons.

What are the EMFA’s objectives?

The proliferation of digital services has exponentially changed the way in which we engage with information, bringing both opportunities and challenges. In an increasingly digital world, the dual threats of mis- and disinformation are a huge challenge for democratic societies, especially at a time when almost half of the world will hold elections in 2024. And as we look at how media consumption evolves over time, many more citizens are now consuming their information online. In this context, the primary objectives of the EMFA are to ensure media plurality, as well as editorial and functional independence of public media, and to protect journalists across the EU. 

Misinformation is the sharing of inaccurate information. Disinformation is the sharing of inaccurate information, with the intention to mislead.

CC’s support for journalists 

Access to verified information is a basic human right and an issue we care deeply about at CC, especially as part of our work on Open Journalism. In 2023, we published A Journalist’s Guide to Creative Commons, which offers practical advice on how to make the most out of CC licenses in journalism and encourages journalists to openly license their outputs.

We find that CC-licensed news articles can dramatically increase their spread. The Conversation, a nonprofit network of eight international news sites publishing hundreds of useful articles of news and analysis each week under CC licenses, reports that around 60% of their readership comes from republished articles. Furthermore, small news outlets, lacking budgets for image subscriptions, turn to CC-licensed images on platforms like Flickr for free access to media.

Policy engagement with the EU

Starting with our Statement on the Introduction of the EU Media Freedom Act, we have provided context and input into the EU policy making process regarding the costs and risks of disinformation,  through parliamentary hearings and engagement on the EMFA text itself. We have outlined how our licenses and our community-based work can support free and fair access to pluralist media content as well as defend independence of information for citizens, whether they access their information through more traditional channels (TV, radio, newsprint) or more modern, digital channels. 

Our efforts centered on Article 17, which introduced the so-called “media exception,” thus creating special privileges for some incumbent, traditional media such as commercial newspapers and broadcasters. We argued that such a provision would disfavor smaller and independent creators, interfere with policies aimed at protecting users from harmful information, and have implications for how all people are able to share their creativity and knowledge online. 

EMFA: A positive step forward but not the end of the road

While we welcome adoption of the EMFA, we believe the EU must remain active and vigilant in the fight against disinformation, resolute in its defense of independent journalism, and tireless in its defense of media plurality. We remain concerned about several aspects of the EMFA, particularly around the “media exception,” including: 

• Public media should not get a lighter treatment than private media: We believe that public media do not inherently have lower risks of disinformation. So while we welcome the provisions on ownership transparency, we feel the text still falls short in providing lighter touch provisions for state-owned, state-funded media outlets which may hide behind domestic standards bodies and regulators.
• Traditional vs new media – same standards should apply to both: We remain unconvinced by the inferred assumption that public channels, which often tend to be “traditional” media outlets such as radio and TV, are more “reliable” than private media outlets, in particular digital ones. Citizens have a right to expect that all media, irrespective of ownership structure or interfaces used, should respect the same norms and standards. 
• Content moderation provisions risk exacerbating dis- and misinformation:  We support the premise that decisions on content moderation by all operators, including very large online platforms, do not per se negatively affect media freedom. However, we fear the 24-hour “must-carry” obligation could have the perverse effect of allowing dis- and misinformation to spread further and faster. The “going viral” nature of social media and platforms is a challenge to balancing content moderation vs. robust controls to limit arbitrary removal of information. Despite the EMFA’s creation of an appeals process, the final text still lacks appropriate checks and balances to ensure content moderation can be practically enforced in a robust, proportionate way across all platforms. We also fear this could risk undermining the Digital Services Act implementation and encourage other stakeholders to request similar privileges in content moderation policies, creating a patchwork of potentially inconsistent rules. 

In short, we strongly believe journalism provides a crucial public service. Access to verifiable information and stories that question the underlying terrain of power is critical to all democratic societies. Open-access information provides the strongest collective bulwark against the societally corrosive effects of mis/disinformation in the public arena. 

While the EMFA may not be applicable by the time EU citizens cast their votes in June this year, we applaud the EU’s efforts to strengthen its regime in this important area. CC will continue to engage with policymakers to enhance the sharing of knowledge and defend the basic rights and freedoms enshrined in the EU acquis. 

For more information on our work on policy and on open journalism, contact us at info@creativecommons.org.

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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

The post CC Supports a new Digital Knowledge Act for Europe appeared first on Creative Commons.