Report from the Creative Commons board meeting in Warsaw

Cathy Casserly, October 27th, 2011

CC’s Board of Directors met during the first day of the Global Summit on September 16, 2011 at the Primate’s Palace in Warsaw, Poland. Prof. Brian Fitzgerald was appointed as a Director of the corporation and to its Audit Committee. The Board also expressed its grateful appreciation to Alek Tarkowski and the CC Poland team for their excellent preparation of the Global Summit and to departing Vice President John Wilbanks for his outstanding accomplishments at Science Commons. Prof. Carroll reported on the success of the recent Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest noting that CC affiliates formed a significant portion of leading thinkers and activists in this field and pointed to the resulting Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest. The Audit Committee’s conflict of interest reviews were also ratified. The remainder of the meeting was dedicated to discussion of improvements to the board structure, fundraising, and strategic objectives.

This was the first time in six years that a CC Board meeting has been held in conjunction with an affiliate Summit event. It was a unique and immensely helpful opportunity for the Directors to make personal contacts with CC supporters and to share directly in the rich expertise and insightful perspective of the affiliate community.

You are the Power of Open: 2011 Creative Commons Annual Campaign

Jane Park, October 25th, 2011

CC Line by Shinjirou / CC BY

Today marks the official launch of the 2011 Creative Commons Annual Campaign! Please join us in powering the future of openness!

This year, we are offering a limited teal edition of the CC “I love to share” t-shirt to everyone who donates $50 or more (until supplies run out). For those who donate $300 or more, in addition to the t-shirt, we are offering beautiful hard copy editions of The Power of Open, stories of creators sharing knowledge, art, and data using Creative Commons.

The world is experiencing an explosion of openness. From artists inviting creative collaboration to governments around the world requiring publicly funded works be available to everyone, the spirit and practice of sharing is gaining momentum and producing results. We post about these results frequently; subscribe to the CC newsletter for a distilled monthly rundown.

Creative Commons relies on donations to build and constantly improve the technical and legal tools that enable openness to flourish. The future of openness is bright, but ensuring that future requires urgent and sustained effort. CC is continuing to improve the usefulness of our licenses and helping even more artists, institutions and governments share their works. We are reaching a critical mass and need your support now more than ever.

What you can do to help

Help us share the power of open! Spread the word in the following ways:

• Add a widget or button to your blog or website from https://creativecommons.net/spread
• Tell your friends and family about the campaign! Tweet this post. Reblog it under CC BY.
• Add a link to the campaign in your email signature: “Please donate to the CC Annual Campaign, going on now! https://creativecommons.net/donate”
• Retweet us throughout the campaign! http://twitter.com/creativecommons

We’re a nonprofit organization that is very happy to provide our tools and services for free, and we want to remain that way! Learn more: “Why does Creative Commons run an annual fundraising campaign? What is the money used for and where does it go?”

The CC community participates in Open Access Week 2011

Jane Park, October 24th, 2011

Open Access (storefront) by Gideon Burton / CC BY-SA

Open Access Week, now in its 5th year, is taking place this week, October 24-30. “Open Access to information—the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need—has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.” The fifth annual OA Week is kicking off with events around the world, and the CC community is joining. Below we highlight a few of these activities!

Open Access Week Perú

Both CC Perú and CC Chile will present at Open Access Week Perú. CC Chile’s Alberto Cerda will be one of the speakers opening the conference on October 25, with CC Perú’s Rafael A. Salazar Gamarra giving a talk on CC, open access and copyright on October 26. Open Access Week Perú is a series of activities that addresses different aspects and approaches to open access internationally and aims to highlight the various initiatives that promote free access to academic and scientific information in Perú and elsewhere. The full program is available at http://www.openaccessperu.org.

Open Access Seminar in Poland

On October 28, CC Poland’s Alek Tarkowski and Kamil Śliwowski will lead a seminar on open publishing models and the use of new media in scientific work. The seminar will take place at the Polish Culture Institute in the University of Warsaw. In addition, the Open Education Coalition in Poland is organizing several open access events throughout the country. For more information, see CC Poland’s blog post.

SHOW – Share Open Access Worldwide in Croatia

SHOW (Share/OpenAccess/Worldwide) will celebrate Open Access Week in Croatia. On October 26, CC Croatia’s Tomislav Medak will give a talk on CC licensing and Open Access at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Rijeka. The idea is to raise awareness among Croatian students about the importance of the free flow of information and open access to research literature, which is not a familiar term in the region, by raising questions about what students are already well familiar with, i.e., intellectual property. The students will be introduced to Copyleft movement, Creative Commons licensing, Open Projects, Open Content movement, Open Access movement and the Right to Research Coalition; and they will be invited to join the debate about the prospects for a world of open values. The full program is available at http://www.intechweb.org/show.html.

Open Access Week online

CC staff are also promoting open access in various webinars and telecasts, including the New Directions in Scholarly Communication Online Seminar, the Right to Research Coalition’s webcast on Open Access and the Impact of Open on Research, and a telephone seminar for the State Bar of California. Today, October 24, CC Senior Adviser John Wilbanks joins the New Directions in Scholarly Communication Online Seminar to discuss the changing landscape of scholarly communication and scientific publishing. On October 26, John will also discuss Open Access and how open has the power to transform research for the Right to Research Coalition. On October 27, Aurelia J. Schultz, CC Counsel and Africa Regional Coordinator, will give a presentation on CC licenses for the Intellectual Property section of the California State Bar, to inform lawyers about CC licenses and how they can help their clients use CC licenses or CC-licensed works.

Open for Comment – Public Draft of the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative Specification

Greg Grossmeier, October 21st, 2011

As you may remember, the LRMI Technical Working Group, with the input of the wider community, has been working to create a set of metadata terms to describe learning resources. This set of terms is being developed with the goal of gaining acceptance into the Schema.org specification.

Today I am pleased to share with you the current draft version of the LRMI specification. We are sharing this now so that the wider community has a chance to review and make comments. We know, as well as anyone, that sharing early drafts of the work product is a great way of improving the end result.

Please review the current draft LRMI spec and post any technical comments you might have to the public LRMI mailing list by November 11. If you have other non-technical comments/concerns, please feel free to use the LRMI.net discussion board.

Blackboard to add support for CC Attribution

Jane Park, October 19th, 2011

Blackboard, the popular Learning Management System (LMS), has announced that they will build in support for CC licensing, specifically enabling instructors the ability to publish and share their course materials under the CC Attribution (CC BY) license. From the press release,

“Support for OER enables instructors to publish and share their courses under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) so that anyone can easily preview and download the course content in Blackboard and Common Cartridge formats. The new functionality is available now for CourseSites, Blackboard’s free, fully-hosted and supported cloud offering launched a year ago and now used by over 18,000 instructors from nearly 12,000 institutions in 113 countries. Similar support for OER will be available soon for Blackboard Learn.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed also covered Blackboard’s move toward openness in education. Cable Green, CC’s Director of Global Learning, notes,

“The core part of any OER is an open license, and Blackboard has shown its leadership by empowering instructors to share so others can revise, reuse, remix and redistribute their courses.”

New CC Job Opportunities: Seeking Logistics Rockstars!

Jennifer Yip, October 17th, 2011

London, gold star by Lars Plougmann / CC BY-SA

If you have a knack for time management and logistics coordination, please consider Creative Commons’ two new support positions: Temporary Office Assistant or Project Coordinator/Executive Assistant. Both positions will be key members of the team supporting the CEO and organization as a whole.

Ideal candidates are proficient in basic computer and Internet technologies, have demonstrated customer service experience, and can manage multiple tasks with shifting priorities. Joining CC means getting the chance to interact with motivated staff and a brilliant international network of affiliates and community members.

Please feel free to share these job descriptions as far and wide as possible. We will be accepting applications on a rolling basis until we find the right candidates. Please be sure to indicate the job title you are interested in applying for in the email subject line (“Temp Office Assistant” or “Project Coordinator/Exec Assistant”), and send your applications to “jobs@creativecommons.org”.

CC Portugal launches second localized suite of CC licenses

Jessica Coates, October 14th, 2011

Portugal x Holland by pedroffmarques / CC BYCongratulations to CC Portugal for launching localized versions of the CC 3.0 licenses!

These are Portugal’s second localized CC licenses. Although CC’s international license suite is appropriate and intended for use around the globe, CC has historically permitted affiliates to port (linguistically translate and then adapt) the licenses to account for local nuances in the law. Porting has been a means of encouraging an understanding for how the licenses operate, team and community building and engagement, and adoption efforts.

With the 3.0 ports now completed for Portugal, creators like Pedro Marques, whose picture you can see to the left, have a choice of selecting either an international or a locally ported license depending on their objectives.

CC HQ worked closely with the local jurisdiction team to produce these new license ports. As always, thanks must go to the teams at FCEE-Católica and INTELI in Portugal for their efforts to implement the licenses in their country. In this case, particular thanks must also go to the Portguese legal lead, Teresa Nobre, who did the majority of the work for the 3.0 licences.

You can find the new licenses via CC’s license chooser tool, and find out more about the local teams on the Portugal affiliate page on our wiki.

For those of you interested in still more details, this ported license suite is one of the last that will be ported. As announced previously and posted on our website, CC is winding down our 3.0 porting process in anticipation of 4.0, expected to be completed late 2012 or early 2013. Only porting projects that were underway as of the beginning of 2011 are being allowed to move forward. This frees both CC and our amazing affiliate network to engage fully on drafting the most robust license suite yet.

Watch this space for announcements relating to the few residual ported license suites to be launched, as well as upcoming information about the 4.0 process and a recap of the launch at the recent CC Global Summit in Warsaw.

Congratulations once again to CC Portugal!

Ada Lovelace Day: the Women behind Librebus

Jane Park, October 7th, 2011

It’s a little late in the day in some timezones, but we couldn’t let the day go by without mentioning some inspiring women for Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate and “raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and maths by encouraging people around the world to talk about the women whose work they admire.”

Rather than highlighting just one woman, we thought we’d highlight several–the women behind Librebus! which includes current CC Guatemala lead Renata Avila and former CC International Project Manager Michelle Thorne, among others.

LibreBus by librebushon-1-10 / CC BY-NC-SA

Librebus, a project inspired by Free Culture principles, consisted of a regional tour spanning most of May of this year to explore Central American shared culture and digital communities. Twenty-seven “librenautas” with different nationalities, backgrounds and skills, from the free software community, Creative Commons chapters, freedom of speech activists and natural commons experts, shared their “open” knowledge with others in a variety of activities, from roundtables to public data hackathons and the first Central American CC Salon in Guatemala.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! And if you haven’t already, also check out Renata’s post on more Inspirational Women in Action at the intersection of technology and social change.

CC News: Metadata for millions of cultural works will be published under CC0

Jane Park, October 6th, 2011

Banner photo is a film still from Europeana Remix by Europeana – CC BY-SA.

Europe’s national librarians support opening up their data via CC0

Jane Park, October 4th, 2011

Following the exciting news of Europeana’s new data exchange agreement, which authorizes Europeana to release the metadata for millions of cultural works into the public domain using the CC0 public domain dedication, the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL) voted to support the agreement in a meeting last week at the Royal Library of Denmark. CENL represents Europe’s national libraries and “is responsible for the massive collection of publications that represent the accumulated knowledge of Europe.” From the press release,

“It means that the datasets describing all the millions of books and texts ever published in Europe – the title, author, date, imprint, place of publication and so on, which exists in the vast library catalogues of Europe – will become increasingly accessible for anybody to re-use for whatever purpose they want.

…

Bruno Racine, new Chair of CENL and President of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Dr. Elisabeth Niggemann, former Chair of CENL and Director of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, welcomed the leadership shown by CENL. Dr Niggemann said…‘Only in that way can society derive full social and economic benefit from the data that we’ve created to record Europe’s published output over the past 500 years. The best analogy is between bottled water and a water main. Rather than bottling it and branding it, we’re putting data on tap, so that everyone has free and open access, and can use it for whatever purpose they need.’”

Read more about Europeana’s Data Exchange Agreement.