Commons News
Digital Public Library of America Launches
Creative Commons would like to congratulate the Digital Public Library of America on its official launch today. The DPLA, which has been in planning since 2010, brings together millions of digital resources from numerous libraries, archives, and museums.
The Digital Public Library of America will launch a beta of its discovery portal and open platform at noon ET today. The portal will deliver millions of materials found in American archives, libraries, museums, and cultural heritage institutions to students, teachers, scholars, and the public. Far more than a search engine, the portal will provide innovative ways to search and scan through its united collection of distributed resources. Special features will include a dynamic map, a timeline that allow users to visually browse by year or decade, and an app library that provides access to applications and tools created by external developers using DPLA’s open data.
In January, DPLA announced that all of its metadata would be in the public domain under the CC0 Public Domain Declaration. The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Joris Pekel applauded that announcement:
The decision to apply the CC0 Public Domain waiver to the metadata will greatly improve interoperability with Europeana, Europe’s equivalent of the DPLA. Now that more different initiatives start publishing digitised heritage and its metadata, interoperability becomes more and more important in order to create a linked web of cultural heritage data, instead of new data silos. By both choosing the CC0 Public Domain waiver, Europeana and the DPLA take a great a step forward in achieving their goal.
We applaud DPLA’s commitment to open data and are excited about the launch of such an important resource.
No Comments »Free Music Archive Launches Public Domain Music Contest
Beautiful Dreamer
Stephen Foster / Public Domain
Remember the Happy Birthday song contest? Our friends at the Free Music Archive and WFMU are running another challenge to bring more music into the commons. But this time, it’s all about creating new, public domain recordings of public domain compositions.
Bring the public domain into the future! This April, WFMU and the Free Music Archive are challenging artists everywhere to create new recordings and contemporary arrangements of historic compositions available in the public domain. We’re calling this our Revitalize Music Contest.
Every song (except for perhaps “Happy Birthday“) will someday fall out of copyright. Archives such as the IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library and Public Domain Information Project chart the vast and ever-expanding troves of public domain music. Participants in our Revitalize Music Contest will help bring these works to life by creating new recordings, and feeding them back into the public domain.
To enter the contest, participants must release their recordings into the public domain via the CC0 Public Domain Waiver. The Free Music Archive will hire a director to create a music video of the winning recording.
Submissions are due April 28, so get started on your recording. For inspiration, check out this early entry, Noel Bush‘s ASMR-inducing rendition of “Beautiful Dreamer“:
No Comments »U.S. States considering public access policies
With the introduction at the federal level of both the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) and the White House public access directive, several states have begun to think about supporting public access to publicly funded research. Like the proposed federal legislation and White House policy, the state-level bills aim to support the notion that the taxpaying public should have access to the research it funds. The Illinois legislation is particularly interesting in that it has included a reuse rights provision whereby the articles developed as a result of state funds would be shared under an open license such as CC BY.
California
Notwithstanding any other law, each state agency that provides funding in the form of a research grant to a grantee for direct research shall develop a public access policy that shall do the following:
(1) Include a requirement that electronic versions of the author’s final manuscripts, or a link to an electronic version of the author’s final manuscript in an open access digital repository of original research papers that have been accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals and result from research supported from state agency funding, be submitted to the funding state agency and the California State Library.
(2) Provide free online public access to such final peer-reviewed manuscripts or published versions as soon as practicable, but not later than six months after publication in peer-reviewed journals. [...]
New York
Each agency that provides funding for direct research shall develop a public access policy that shall:
(i) Include a requirement that electronic versions of the author’s final manuscripts of original research papers that have been accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals and result from research supported from funding by the state of New York, be submitted to such funding agency;
(ii) Provide free online public access to such final peer-reviewed manuscripts or published versions as soon as practicable but not later than six months after publication in peer-reviewed journals; [...]
Illinios
(a) No later than 12 months after the effective date of this Act, each public institution of higher education shall develop an open access to research articles policy.
(b) All public institutions of higher education shall develop policies that provide for the following:
(1) the submission, by all faculty employed by the public institution of higher education, to the employing institution (or to an institution designated by the employing institution) of an electronic version of the author’s final manuscript of original research papers upon acceptance by a scholarly research journal, including peer-reviewed journals and related publications used by researchers to disseminate the results of their institution-affiliated research; [...]
(4) free online public access to the final peer-reviewed manuscripts or published versions immediately upon publication in a peer-reviewed journal;
(5) an irrevocable, worldwide copyright license granted by the author to the public that permits any use of an article on condition that the author and original publisher are attributed as such and that any such attribution is not made in a way that implies endorsement of the use by the author or original publisher. [...]
New York state seal is in the public domain.
California state seal licensed under CC BY-SA.
Illinois state seal is in the public domain.
No Comments »Open Textbook Summit
On April 8 & 9, 2013 BCcampus hosted, and Creative Commons facilitated, an Open Textbook Summit in Vancouver British Columbia Canada. The Open Textbook Summit brought together government representatives, student groups, and open textbook developers in an effort to coordinate and leverage open textbook initiatives.
Participants included:
BCcampus
BC Ministry of Advanced Education, Innovation and Technology (AEIT)
Creative Commons
eCampus Alberta
Alberta Enterprise & Advanced Education
The 20 Million Minds Foundation
Washington Open Course Library
University of Minnesota Open Textbook Catalogue
Lumen Learning
Siyavula
Open Courseware Consortium
OpenStax/Connexions
Student Public Interest Research Groups
Right to Research Coalition
Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA)
California and British Columbia recently announced initiatives to create open textbooks for high enrollment courses. Susan Brown in her welcoming remarks on behalf of the Deputy Minister of Advanced Education, Innovation and Technology noted the Open Textbook Summit was “a unique opportunity to share information about the work underway in our respective jurisdictions and organizations to capitalize on lessons learned; to identify common areas of interest; and to discover potential opportunities for collaboration. The real power of a project like this is only realized by working together.”
On the summit’s first day the BC government announced it was “Moving to the next chapter on free online textbooks” releasing a list of the 40 most highly enrolled first and second-year subject areas in the provincial post-secondary system.
Over the course of the summit participants identified existing open textbooks that could be used for BC’s high enrollment courses. Development plans for creating additional open textbooks were mapped out. Strategies for academic use of open textbooks were discussed ranging from open textbooks for high enrollment courses to zero textbook degree programs where every course in a credential has an open textbook.
Open textbook developers described the tools they are using for authoring, editing, remixing, repository storage, access, and distribution. Participants discussed the potential for creating synergy between initiatives through use of common tools and processes.
Measures of success, including saving students money and improved learning outcomes, were shared and potential for a joint open textbook research agenda explored. The summit concluded with suggestions from all participants on ways to collaborate going forward. David Porters recommendation of an ongoing Open Textbook Federation was enthusiastically endorsed.
Mary Burgess created a Google group called The Open Textbook Federation for further conversations and collaborations. This group is open to anyone currently working on, or thinking of working on, an Open Textbook Project. Notes from the Open Textbook Summit are posted online. Clint Lalonde created a Storify of the Twitter conversation captured during the summit.
The Open Textbook Summit was an incredible day and a half of learning. The sharing of insights, experiences, hopes, and ideas left everyone energized with a commitment to join together in a cross-border federation that collaborates on open textbooks.
2 Comments »DRM in HTML5 Is a Bad Idea
Creative Commons strongly believes in the respect of copyright and the wishes of content creators. That’s why CC has created a range of legal tools that rely in part on copyright to enable our vision of a shared commons of creative and intellectual works.
But when creators’ rights come at the expense of a usable internet, everyone suffers for it. Over the past 15 years, various companies have started using mechanisms to limit the ways in which users can use their content. These digital rights management (DRM) techniques make the internet less usable for everyone. CC believes that no DRM system is able to account for the full complexity of the law, since they create black-and-white situations where legally there is wiggle room (such as for fair use, for example). This failing causes DRM to limit consumer freedoms that would otherwise be permitted, and that can create very real harm to consumers. Examples abound, but a recent one can be seen in this report on how DRM and the DMCA have seriously limited the ability of the visually impaired to have access to e-books they can use over the past 15 years.
The W3C recently published a draft proposal that would make DRM a part of HTML5. While CC applauds efforts to get more content distributed on the web, DRM does more harm than good. In addition to limiting consumer freedoms, it’s not at all clear this proposal would even be effective in curbing piracy. Given the proposal’s architecture, it will cause dependence on outside components which will not be a part of the standardized web. A standardized web is essential to allow anyone to participate in it without locking them into giving any one player a say on what proprietary device, software, or technology they need to use. The proposal opens up exactly such a dependency: it allows web pages to require specific proprietary software or hardware to be installed. That a dangerous direction for the web, because it means that for many real-life uses it will be impossible to build end-to-end open systems to render web content.
Read EFF’s post on defending the open web from DRM for more details on the proposal, history, threat. Get the facts and, if you’re interested, sign the Free Software Foundation’s petition to oppose DRM in web standards.
No Comments »CC Talks With: CC Talks With: David Liao: Open Courseware and CC Licenses
Last week a researcher and educator by the name of David Liao contacted our team at Creative Commons about open courseware he had created, which we tweeted:
“A mathematical way to think about biology.” Really well put-together CC BY-SA course. qbio.lookatphysics.com @lookatphysics #oer
— creativecommons (@creativecommons) March 25, 2013
I sat down last Wednesday to speak with David about his course, motivations for using a CC-license, and about other challenges in scholarly communication and education that are being changed by new ways of “open.” He’s created a set of videos and curriculum titled A Mathematical Way to Think about Biology, released under a CC BY-SA license. David, an Analyst with the University of California, SF and a member of the Princeton Physical Sciences-Oncology Network, recognized that quantitative research is fundamental to hard science disciplines, but there are few openly licensed training resources on these methods that can translate to Biology as well as other non-scientific fields.
Screenshot from David’s Udemy course
Already a proponent of Open Access (OA) to research publications, David sums up his view on how principles of OA can be applied to education:
”Speaking loosely along the same lines of sentiment [of Open Access], it is likewise preferable to release, as free cultural works, both scientific literature and the instructional materials by virtue of which that literature becomes readable.”
As David explained, there is a gap between the highly-technical aspects of training future researchers and the practical resources available; one that he hopes to begin to fill by making his materials available online. He has developed more than ten learning modules ranging from fundamental mathematical concepts of algebra and geometry to more complex areas of spatially-resolved models and cellular automata, all described in ways that apply to the biological sciences. The slide decks and tutorial videos have all been released under a CC BY-SA license, which allows reuse and remixing the content, so long as any adapted content carries the same copyleft license. David’s content has been structured as a course, is available on the Udemy online learning platform and has had nearly one thousand participants use the material.
An advocate of many things Open for some time, our conversation shifted from OER to OA. David offered his take on Open Access and how scholarly communication has reached a point where tools like CC licenses are needed to maintain progress in a digital age.
“Ten years ago, when it came to negotiating legal matters around copyright and intellectual property, we would need to be able to do some serious Jiu-Jitsu, and likely involve a team of lawyers. Creative Commons [licenses] makes this communication so much easier.”
Fort Worth MMA and BJJ_5896 / ironsidemma / CC BY 2.0
By making his content available on the web and applying a CC license to his work, David has taken steps to not only make his educational media openly accessible, but also explicitly describe how others can reuse his work. A longstanding problem in defining the core characteristics of “open”, digital media that is freely accessible but does not allow for reuse or remixing is often confused with open content. David has been pleased to see learners using the materials in his course, as well as having had fellow college professors contact him about using his content to supplement their own teaching. When asked about his thoughts on others who likely will be remixing and building upon his learning content, David welcomed it fully, and is interested to have others to contact with links to derivative works.
A case study on the CC Wiki for A Mathematical Approach to Biology can be found here.
David’s course can be found on Udemy here, and his personal website is here.
You can also follow David on Twitter here.
Free Culture Conference hits NYC April 20-21
The Students for Free Culture conference will take place in New York City April 20-21. The conference–dubbed FCX 2013–will be held at New York Law School.
The Students for Free Culture Conference is an annual gathering of student and non-student activists, thinkers, and innovators who are dedicated to advancing discussions on technology, law, and public policy. Through panels and keynote speakers, FCX 2013 will focus on current issues in intellectual property law, open access to educational resources, maker culture, and technology policy. Through workshops, the conference will revisit the core pillars of the free culture movement, examine the success stories from our movement, and identify new ways in which Students for Free Culture can advocate for a more free, open, and participatory digital environment.
Longtime SFC member Benjamin Mako Hill (who will be giving the opening keynote) says: “If previous years are any indication, the conference can serve as an incredible introduction to free culture, free software, wikis, remixing, copyright, patent and trademark reform, and participatory culture. For folks that are already deeply involved, FCX is among the best places I know to connect with other passionate, creative, people working on free culture issues.”
The event is open to all, with a suggested $15 donation to help defray costs. Registration is open, and some limited travel assistance may be available for students of active SFC chapters.
No Comments »Open Education Around the World – A 2013 Open Education Week Summary
Creative Commons congratulates all those who participated in the second annual Open Education Week March 11-15, 2013. It’s impressive to see how global open education has become with contributors from over 30 different countries showcasing their work and more than 20,000 people from over 130 countries visiting the Open Education Week website during the week. Open Education Week featured over 60 webinars open to participation from anyone and numerous local events and workshops around the world.
We thought we’d highlight a few Creative Commons global affiliate events from Open Education Week and share a list of urls for Open Education Week webinar recordings the Open Courseware Consortium has published.
The Creative Commons China Mainland team successfully held an Open Education Forum on the afternoon of March 16th at Renmin University of China, Beijing. One highlight of this salon worth special attention is the Toyhouse team from Tsinghua University led by Prof. Benjamin Koo, and their recent project eXtreme Learning Process (XLP). This team is a inspiring example of innovative learning, and a user of CC licenses and OER.
Tobias Schonwetter, Creative Commons regional coordinator for Africa gave an Open Education for Africa presentation explaining why Creative Commons is so important for Open Educational Resources.
The School of Open launched with:
- 17 courses, including 4 facilitated courses and 13 stand-alone courses (for participants to take at their own pace).
- ~15 course organizers, affiliated with several organizations/initiatives, including: the National Copyright Office of Australia; University of Michigan’s Open.Michigan; Kennisland/CC Netherlands; Communicate OER, a Wikipedia initiative; Open Video Forum (xm:lab, Academy of Fine Arts Saar); Jamlab (a high school mentorship program in Kenya); Wikimedia Germany and CC Germany
These are just the tip of the rich global discourse that took place during Open Education Week. All webinars during Open Education Week were recorded, with links listed below. You can also view the videos directly on the Open Education Week YouTube channel and on the Open Education Week website, under events and webinars.
Webinar recordings
Monday, March 11
· Building Research Profile and Culture with Open Access
· Learners orchestrating their own learning
· Learning Innovations and Learning Quality: The future of open education and
free digital resources
· Näin käytät ja teet avoimia sisältöjä /How to use and create open content
· New global open educational trends: policy, learning design and mobile
· The multiple facets of Openness in #udsnf12
· Licencias Creative Commons para recursos educativos, ¿que son? ¿como usarlas?
· Designing OER with Diversity In Mind
· وسائل تعليمية تشاركية : تطوير الوسائل التعليمية تشاركيًا باستخدام أداة الابتكار ومنصة سكراتش البرمجية
· Driving Adoptions of OER Through Communities of Practice
· Khan Academy: Personalized learning experiences
· Good practices on open content licensing
Tuesday, March 12
· OCW in the European Higher Education Context: How to make use of its full
potential for virtual mobility
· OLDS MOOC Grand finale (final convergence session)
· Äidinkielestä riippumaton suomen kielen opetus
· Opening Up Education
· CourseSites by Blackboard: A Free, Hosted, Scalable Platform for Open
Education Initiatives
· Xpert Search Engine and the Xpert Image Attribution Service
· Capacitación para la educación abierta: OportUnidad en Latinoamérica
· Language learning independent of mother language
· Interactive Learning with Wolfram Technologies
· Collaborative Boldly Confronts Licensing Issues
· Buenas prácticas en el uso de licencias para contenidos abiertos
Wednesday, March 13
· 是“誰”在使用你的開放式課程網站呢?
· The interaction, co-construction and sharing of Netease Open Courses
网易公开课的互动、共建和分享
· Who is using your OCW site?
· Políticas nacionales de Acceso Abierto en Argentina
· Open Policy Network: seeking community input
· OER Commons Green: A Unique Lens on Open Environmental Education
· Creative Commons 4.0 Licenses: What's New for Education?
· How Community Colleges are Innovating with Open Educational Resources
· P2PU: A Showcase of Open Peer Learning
Thursday, March 14
· Open Access policy development at the University of Pretoria: the why, what
and how?
· What you can learn from the UKOER experience
· Why Open Access is Right for the World Bank
· What's behind Open Education? A philosophical insight
· Utilizing OER to Create a Pathway Towards an Affordable Degree
· Toolkit Working Group: Tools to help users discover the content they need (1)
· Learning toys for free: Collaborative educational tools development using
MakeyMakey and SCRATCH platforms
· Teach Syria: The Impact of Teaching Global to Today's Youth
· Re-Creative Commons
· Validating the Learning Obtained through Open Educational Resources
· OER and Alternative Certification Models: An Analysis Framework
· The Open Educational Resources in Brazil as an Instrument to Get Access to
Qualification, The Government Role at OERs Creation & FGV and
São Paulo State Case Studies
Friday, March 15
· Open Education for Africa
· National policies of Open Access to scientific outputs in Argentina
· Re-thinking Developmental Education: Creating a STEM Bridge in the National
STEM Consortium
· Toolkit Working Group: Tools to aid and encourage use of OERs in teaching
· Crowd-sourced Open Courseware Authoring with SlideWiki.org
· Using OER to reduce student cost and increase student learning
· What's next? An open discussion about open education
· OpenStax College Textbooks: Remixable by Design
· An OER Editor for the Rest of Us
Kudos to the OCW Consortium for organizing this event. We look forward to next years.
No Comments »CC Global Summit 2013 – Call for Papers
Listening to Larry’s Keynote [at the Global Summit 2011] / Chiaki Hayashi / CC BY NC SA
We are proud to officially launch the call for papers for CC’s Global Summit 2013.
The Global Summit is Creative Commons’ biannual gathering of CC friends and family. In 2013 it will be held from 21-24 August in Buenos Aires, co-hosted by our local Creative Commons affiliates, Fundación Vía Libre and Wikimedia Argentina.
Attendees to the Summit will discuss strategies to strengthen Creative Commons and its worldwide community, learn about the latest developments in the commons movement worldwide, and showcase local and international projects that use Creative Commons licenses. It’s a great place to meet and present your ideas to the broader Creative Commons and open community. Most importantly, this will be our first ever Summit with a dedicated Spanish-language program.
We encourage anyone with something interesting to say about the present and future of the commons to apply. A Programming Committee consisting of members of the CC community will make the final decision on the program.
You have until 24 May to submit a session for the Summit. Submission forms and a more detailed explanation of the process can be found on our Global Summit wiki.
__________________________________________________________________________
Estamos orgullosos de lanzar oficialmente la convocatoria a charlas para la Cumbre Mundial de Creative Commons de 2013.
La Cumbre Mundial es la reunión de bianual de la comunidad de Creative Commons. En 2013 se llevará a cabo del 21 a 24 de agosto en Buenos Aires, co-organizado por nuestros afiliados locales de Creative Commons, Fundación Vía Libre y Wikimedia Argentina.
Los asistentes a la cumbre discutirán las estrategias para fortalecer Creative Commons y su comunidad en todo el mundo, aprender sobre los últimos acontecimientos en el movimiento mundial de bienes comunes, y mostrar los proyectos locales e internacionales que utilizan las licencias Creative Commons. Es un lugar ideal para reunirse y presentar sus ideas a la comunidad más amplia de Creative Commons. Más importante aún, esta será nuestra primera Cumbre con un apartado en español en el programa.
Animamos a aplicar a cualquier persona que tenga algo interesante para decir sobre el presente y el futuro de los bienes comunes. Un comité de programación integrado por miembros de la comunidad de Creative Commons tomará la decisión final sobre el diseño del programa.
La fecha límite para la presentación de sesiones y charlas es el 24 de mayo. En nuestro wiki se puede encontrar información más detallada sobre el proceso y formas de presentación, así como un espacio abierto a propuestas para la Cumbre.
3 Comments »Now Hiring: Senior Software Engineer
Creative Commons is looking for a senior software engineer. This hire will play a key role in building the next generation of Creative Commons technology. From the job description:
We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join us in creating next generation products and services that enable sharing, curating, remixing, and collaborating on open content.
The Senior Software Engineer is a full-time position reporting to the Director of Product Strategy, and works closely with the rest of the Products & Technology team, including other developers and user experience designers, as well as Creative Commons staff and community volunteers.
This is a rare opportunity to join a brand new team at the ground level. Bring a start-up mentality and lots of energy to build delightful product experiences and help shape the commons to the benefit of everyone.
If that sounds exciting to you, we’d love to hear from you. Check out the full job listing for more information.
1 Comment »
