Weblog
2012 September
Using Free and Open Educational Resources to Support Women and Girls in STEM
Mountain View, CA and Cambridge, MA — Creative Commons and the OpenCourseWare Consortium announce the formation of a task force to determine how open educational resources (OER) can support the success of girls and women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in support of the Equal Futures Partnership, announced on September 24 by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“The gender gap in participation in STEM areas around the world is significant,” said Cathy Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons. “We need to address the barriers to girls’ success in STEM to ensure that the future is filled with bright, ambitious, well-educated people of both genders who are able to contend with future global challenges.”
The OER-STEM task force will examine how OER can attract and support girls in STEM education, including additional support services necessary to ensure high levels of success. OER are high-quality educational materials that are openly licensed and shared at no cost, allowing learners and educators to use, adapt, change and add information to suit their education goals. The task force will include experts in STEM education for girls and women along with experts in OER to determine specific projects that will advance achievement in these important areas.
“We are seeking innovative support solutions for girls to succeed in STEM subjects using open educational resources,” said Mary Lou Forward, Executive Director of the OpenCourseWare Consortium. “Since OER can be accessed freely by anyone, anywhere, and modified to fit different cultural contexts and learning needs around the world, we are looking at this issue from a global perspective.”
About Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a globally-focused nonprofit organization dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. Creative Commons provides free licenses and other legal tools to give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions and get credit for their creative work while allowing others to copy, distribute and make specific uses of it.
About the OpenCourseWare Consortium
The OpenCourseWare Consortium is an international group of hundreds of institutions and organizations that support the advancement open sharing in higher education. The OCW Consortium envisions a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so anywhere in the world, where everyone, everywhere is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire.
3 Comments »California passes groundbreaking open textbook legislation
It’s official. In California, Governor Jerry Brown has signed two bills (SB 1052 and SB 1053) that will provide for the creation of free, openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses offered by California colleges. The legislation was introduced by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and passed by the California Senate and Assembly in late August.
A crucial component of the California legislation is that the textbooks developed will be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY):
The textbooks and other materials are placed under a creative commons attribution license that allows others to use, distribute, and create derivative works based upon the digital material while still allowing the authors or creators to receive credit for their efforts.
The CC BY license allows teachers to tailor textbook content to students’ needs, permits commercial companies to take the resources and build new products with it (such as video tutorials), and opens the doors for collaboration and improvement of the materials.
Access to affordable textbooks is extremely important for students, as textbook costs continue to rise at four times the rate of inflation, sometimes surpassing the cost of tuition at some community colleges. So, in addition to making the digital textbooks available to students free of cost, the legislation requires that print copies of textbooks will cost about $20.
This is a massive win for California, and a most welcome example of open policy that aims to leverage open licensing to save money for California families and support the needs of teachers and students. We’ll continue to track this initiative and other Open Education Policies at our OER registry.
25 Comments »CC News: #cc10 Is Coming
Stay up to date with CC news by following us on Twitter.
Top stories:
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#cc10 is coming! Get ready for a ten-day celebration of the history and future of Creative Commons. |
Creative Commons is looking for an experienced, innovative, and technically inclined individual to drive product development at CC. |
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Since 2010, Arab world–based Creative Commons communities have celebrated Ramadan by organizing Creative Commons Iftars across the region. |
Europeana — Europe’e digital library — has released 20 million records into the public domain using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. This release is the largest one-time dedication of cultural data to the public domain using CC0. |
In other news:
- There’s been a lot of discussion and debate recently about CC’s NonCommercial and NoDerivatives terms.
- A recent dispute involving Wikimedia demonstrates CC licenses' ability to withstand legal scrutiny.
- If you work with K-12 students in the US (or if you are one), then you’ll want to know about the Engage 2012 student video competition.
- Ten years after the release of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, OA advocates recently released updated recommendations in support of open access around the world, touching on areas including policy, licensing, sustainability, and advocacy.
- After more than two years of hard work, the CC China Mainland 3.0 licenses are ready for use.
- We end on a sad note by remembering Lee Dirks, a strategist at Microsoft Research Connections and friend of the open access movement.
We rely on our supporters to continue our work enabling stories like those above.
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Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, Google, LuLu, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla Corporation, The Omidyar Network, Red Hat, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as members of the public (you!).
#cc10 Is Coming
Creative Commons is turning 10 this year! We’ll be hosting parties around the world and sharing party favors online for a ten-day celebration, December 7 to 16.
To see a listing of the parties we have planned, visit the #cc10 wiki page. There are more in the works, so stay tuned.
Do you want to celebrate CC’s tenth anniversary in your city? Host your own #cc10 event! Even if it’s just a happy hour after work, we’d love to hear about it and help you spread the word. Send us an email at press@creativecommons.org and let us know what you’re planning. We’ll add it to our listing and send you some special CC swag for the party (supplies are limited and we may not be able to ship to every location, but we’ll try).
8 Comments »Internet Brands and Wikimedia: BY-SA Withstands Scrutiny
Yelabuga Medieval Tower / Ерней / Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Every day, millions of people rely on CC licenses for all manner of sharing, from merely redistributing recordings or using images found on Flickr in presentations, to leveraging massive collaborative works developed on wikis in educational settings. All of this normally happens very quietly and without fuss or exception, so long as simple license conditions are respected and those involved have no other reason for complaint. But the exceptional (rare, that is) conflict proves the simple rule that CC licenses operate as designed and as advertised: disregard the license conditions and copyright is at issue; follow the conditions and copyright is not.
As an example of the former, almost exactly a year ago we announced that the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike (BY-SA) license had been successfully enforced in a case in Germany. There, a far-right political party had used a photo under BY-SA without providing proper attribution to the author and other information required by the license. The photographer sued to enforce the license, and the district court of Berlin agreed and issued an injunction against the user.
As an example of the latter, members of the Wikitravel community (together with many who left long ago to found Wikivoyage) recently announced plans to migrate to a new travel project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation (meaning a new sibling project alongside Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikipedia and others). All of these sites use BY-SA, which enables the reuse of content among those sites even when conflicts arise or differences of opinion exist about website administration or community management, for example. Indeed, BY-SA was designed precisely to enable this kind of reuse and repurposing of content. In this particular instance, Internet Brands, which currently runs WikiTravel, sued (PDF) two Wikitravel volunteers for trademark infringement, unfair business practices and conspiracy, and seeks a court order enjoining them generally from doing anything that misleads the public into believing the new website is affiliated with Wikitravel, among other things.
Wikimedia Foundation decided to support those volunteers (who are also Wikimedia volunteers) in their legal defense, and in its blog post explained that it did not think it appropriate for Internet Brands to attempt to intimidate the volunteers from communicating freely on their dissatisfaction with IB’s management of the Wikitravel community. As a result, Wikimedia Foundation filed a separate request for declaratory judgment (PDF) seeking a declaration that, “under the terms of the CC License, [Internet Brands] may not restrict the use, reproduction, sale, or modification of content on the Wikitravel website in any manner other than requiring attribution to the creator of the content and that the content be maintained under the same licensing terms”. In addition, the Foundation argues that “[Internet Brands] has no lawful right, title or interest under the CC License to prevent use of such content created by volunteer users and administrators on the Wikitravel website”.
A few claims in the dispute provide the opportunity to highlight some important features of BY-SA and the other CC licenses. First, all CC 3.0 licenses contain mechanisms that protect licensors wanting to distance themselves from the projects and individuals reusing the CC-licensed content in ways allowed by the license, for any reason whatsoever. Our licenses contain a “no endorsement, no sponsorship” clause that prohibits users from implicitly or explicitly asserting or implying “any connection with, sponsorship or endorsement by” the author, the licensor or others to whom attribution is being provided, either for the licensee herself or the work as reused. Additionally, anyone modifying content (when allowed by the license, as BY-SA does) must clearly label or identify that changes have been made, thereby ensuring modifications are not wrongly associated with the original author. Finally, where the original author or licensor wants to completely disassociate themselves from particular reuses, they have the right to request that all attribution and mention of them be removed, and those reusing the work must do so to the extent practicable. These mechanisms provide effective tools for those concerned about being affiliated with permitted reuses of their works.
Second, an assertion in the dispute relates to whether proper attribution has been provided. While the factual underpinnings of this claim are not provided in the court filings and it does not appear the content is question is being used at this time, it’s worth mention that Creative Commons tools provide a sophisticated yet flexible method for reusers to provide proper attribution. All CC licenses permit attribution to be provided in a manner “reasonable to the medium or means” used by the licensee, and for credit to be provided in a “reasonable manner.” This flexibility facilitates compliance by licensees – minimizing the risk that overly onerous and inflexible attribution requirements are simply disregarded as being too difficult – while at the same ensuring that credit is still provided. This makes it easy for reusers to “do the right thing.”
Whatever the decision the court makes regarding the other claims by Internet Brands against the Wikitravel volunteers, it is clear that under the terms of BY-SA, the Wikitravel content can and should be used on other websites, so long as the users comply with the requirements of the license.
4 Comments »Engage 2012 Student Video Competition
If you work with K-12 students in the United States (or if you are one), then you’ll want to know about this video competition. Engage 2012 asks young people to create short videos about political issues impacting their communities. All entries will be uploaded to YouTube under CC BY, meaning lots of great fodder for future remixes.
Every four years, American voters decide who calls the White House home. And the road to the election is full of questions. How does the next presidential election affect you, your family, and your neighborhood?
Answers to this question appear in newspapers, on television, and on the radio. But we want to know what the story is in your community. There’s just one question: Can you tell us in two minutes?
The Engage in Democracy 2012 Student Journalism Challenge is a competition for K-12 students from across the United States and its territories. Our goal is to involve you in the political process.
To participate, shoot a video under two minutes in length using stories from around your community with a focus on one of these six big election topics:
- Voter Turnout
- Jobs and the Economy
- Education Reform
- Health Care
- Energy and the Environment
- Immigration
The contest is open through November 5.
No Comments »Budapest Open Access Initiative policy recommendations for the next 10 years
Ten years after the release of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, OA advocates last week released updated recommendations in support of open access around the world, touching on areas including policy, licensing, sustainability, and advocacy. Of particular interest are recommendations that urge funders to require open access when they make grants: “When possible, funder policies should require libre OA, preferably under a CC-BY license or equivalent.” When funding agencies institute open access policies for the grant funds they distribute, they increase the impact of the research produced. This is because the outputs can be widely reused under the CC-BY license, which allows for reuse for any purpose (even commercial) so long as attribution is given to the author.
The updated recommendation document includes a section on licensing and reuse (see the three listed below). The document “recommend[s] CC-BY or an equivalent license as the optimal license for the publication, distribution, use, and reuse of scholarly work.”
OA repositories typically depend on permissions from others, such as authors or publishers, and are rarely in a position to require open licenses. However, policy makers in a position to direct deposits into repositories should require open licenses, preferably CC-BY, when they can.
OA journals are always in a position to require open licenses, yet most of them do not yet take advantage of the opportunity. We recommend CC-BY for all OA journals.
No Comments »In developing strategy and setting priorities, we recognize that gratis access is better than priced access, libre access is better than gratis access, and libre under CC-BY or the equivalent is better than libre under more restrictive open licenses. We should achieve what we can when we can. We should not delay achieving gratis in order to achieve libre, and we should not stop with gratis when we can achieve libre.
Work with CC: Director of Product Strategy
Creative Commons is looking for an experienced, innovative, and technically inclined individual to drive product development at CC. This individual will play a highly influential role in the future of Creative Commons as we look to the next 10 years.
For those that have been paying attention, this is indeed a re-imagination of the previous solicitation for a Chief Technology Officer. This role has expanded to be a more general direction setting position within CC vis-a-vis tools and products that will enable and sustain CC and its community.
Creative Commons started with a vision of leveraging the Internet to scale the sharing of our collective cultural, scientific, and educational output. To that end, there is an unimaginable number of freely licensed works to build upon, and to build services around, and 90% of the technical groundwork is laid (meaning, of course, there is still more than 90% of the way to go!). Now is an incredibly exciting time to lead the product and technology efforts of Creative Commons — be part of a great team, help communities yearning to share better and more effectively, and engage with developers around the world to help build a better future.
And it is an interesting place to work! Some unique aspects of the CC technical and product team:
- All software developed by CC is free software; see our source repositories and bug tracker;
- We have a small (two software engineers, one system administrator) technology team focused on maintaining and improving CC’s services (implemented using Python, CiviCRM, WordPress, MediaWiki, and other technologies); additionally technology suffuses all of our work, including when policy-oriented — the technology team and especially CTO are frequently called on to provide leadership on broad issues;
- See our CC Labs blog for occasional posts on the details of our technical work and thoughts on related happenings;
- Watch recordings of past CC technology summits;
- Read about the CC Rights Expression Language, a set of recommendations implemented across CC’s services and by many publishers.
We’re accepting resumes through October 12. See the job posting for details.
3 Comments »Europeana releases 20 million records into the public domain using CC0
This week marks a momentous occasion, as Europeana — Europe’s digital library — has released 20 million records into the public domain using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. This release is the largest one-time dedication of cultural data to the public domain using CC0. The Europeana dataset consists of descriptive information from a huge trove of digitized cultural and artistic works. Now, per the Europeana Terms of Use, “all metadata (textual information on digitised cultural heritage) on the site are published without any restrictions on re-use.” The public domain data can be useful for cultural institutions, researchers, and application developers. By removing all copyright restrictions from the data, Europeana helps to promote innovation and economic activity. From the press release:
Importantly, the change represents a valuable contribution to the European Commission’s agenda to drive growth through digital innovation. Online open data is a core resource which can fuel enterprise and create opportunities for millions of Europeans working in Europe’s cultural and creative industries. The sector represents 3.3% of EU GDP and is worth over €150 billion in exports.
Europeana’s announcement was praised by Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission, who said:
Open data is such a powerful idea, and Europeana is such a cultural asset, that only good things can result from the marriage of the two. People often speak about closing the digital divide and opening up culture to new audiences but very few can claim such a big contribution to those efforts as Europeana’s shift to creative commons.
The Creative Commons Affiliate teams in the Netherlands and Luxembourg, through partner organizations Institute for Information Law (IViR), Kennisland, and the Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg provided expert support to Europeana during this process. Europeana has been at the forefront of exploring ways to share the European cultural record. They are one of the first adopters of CC’s Public Domain Mark and continue to support a vibrant, healthy public domain.
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