Report from the first Creative Commons board meeting of 2011
On January 8, 2011, Creative Commons held a board meeting in the San Francisco headquarters.
We discussed the CEO transition plan. I reiterated my commitment to continue working with Creative Commons in my new role as Chair of the Board focusing on international and in particular, the Middle East.
Our current plan is for the transition work to begin immediately, but for Cathy to come on board starting March 1. While the timing and the exact location are to be determined, we will be moving the headquarters from San Francisco to Silicon Valley to be closer to some of our funders and many of our core adopters coinciding with Cathy joining full time.
We reviewed and discussed the strategic plan and the board was supportive of the new structure and the objectives and metrics driven format. There was a discussion about the importance of developing the science and education sections of the vision and strategy more. We discussed the importance of involving the stakeholders and community in the conversation as well and looked to other successful models such as Wikimedia.
The board approved the budget which linked to the strategic plan and its objectives with the understanding that Cathy and I will be working on fund raising over the next few months and that certain costs such as the move and the global meeting were still only estimates. We agreed to return to the board with additional updates as they became available.
We discussed the commitment of the board to add additional board members from the international community and committed to publish the criteria within weeks. The board found no reason why board members couldn’t be added as soon as qualified board members were identified through this process. We hope to add two new non-US board members as soon as possible.
We discussed the global meeting and the board reiterated its support for the meeting.
The board discussed the website redesign. “Phase 0” the initial redesign was viewed as an improvement to the old design. (Data about the performance metrics support this.) The board supported the continuation of the website redesign, but asked staff to be prudent about the budget, interview stakeholders for feedback and input, and use internal resource where this made sense and were available.
1 Comment »Belgian and Israeli Courts Grant Remedies to CC Licensors
Litigation involving CC licenses is infrequent even though we’ve been around almost a decade and hundreds of millions of creative works are published under CC licenses. CC believes that this absence of litigation is evidence of widespread acceptance and understandability of our licenses. That said, we still appreciate occasional decisions by courts confirming that CC licenses operate as intended when tested (we note a few on our wiki), such as recent decisions in Belgium and Israel. These decisions also showcase important features of our licenses and how they operate to help copyright holders share, while fully retaining any rights they have not chosen to grant.
In the Belgian case, Lichôdmapwa v. L’asbl Festival de Theatre de Spa, a theater company used 20 seconds of the song “Abatchouck” in an advertisement. The song had been released by the Belgian band Lichôdmapwa under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND (Attribution, NonCommerical, NoDerivatives) license. Lichôdmapwa brought suit, claiming the theater company violated all three license conditions when it failed to provide attribution, used the song in a commercial advertisement, and used only a segment of the song.
The Belgian court agreed. Citing opinions from Dutch, Spanish and American courts, the judge held that the theater company violated the Creative Commons license and therefore had committed copyright infringement. The Belgian court disagreed with the defendant’s claim of ignorance to the license given the defendant’s prior licensing experience and because the website from which the music was downloaded referenced the CC license. The judge also dismissed the defendant’s claim that because the band was not a member of the Belgian collective rights management association SABAM, the band should receive reduced or no damages. The court awarded the band 4500 Euros.
This month, an Israeli court for the first time granted relief in a suit for copyright infringement brought by a Creative Commons licensor. In Avi Re’uveni v. Mapa inc., the plaintiffs uploaded photographs to Flickr and licensed them under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. The defendant likely violated all three license conditions when she made a collage incorporating the photographs, sold the collages, and did not provide attribution. The defendant asserted she had no knowledge the photographs were under copyright or distributed under a CC licenses, claiming that she had instead downloaded them from another website where no copyright or CC license information existed.
The judge concluded that the defendant had no right to use the copyrighted photographs and therefore was liable for infringement. Although the judge mentioned the CC license only in passing and did not discuss enforceability or whether its terms had been violated, he did not suggest that the license was unenforceable, or that the defendant was not liable for copyright infringement based on the distribution of the photos with a Creative Commons license. For further analysis, CC Israel has made a statement about the case as well.
These cases together highlight some important fundamentals about how CC licenses operate. First and foremost, our licenses operate in conjunction with copyright, not in lieu of copyright. This means that if the terms of the CC license you have applied to your music or other creative work are violated, as the judge concluded in the Belgian case, the result is copyright infringement and nothing less. Conversely, the CC licenses are designed so that downstream users who abide by the license conditions are not in violation of the license. Both court decisions also reinforce a related and subtle (yet important) point for CC licensors — using a CC license does not work against you when it comes to enforcing your copyright later, even when users of your work may not be aware of your license choice. There is no penalty down the line for choosing flexibility over “all rights reserved” when it comes to enforcing your copyright.
These are just a few fundamentals of the licenses that CC works everyday to steward. Please support our ongoing stewardship efforts by donating to Creative Commons today!
A special thanks to our own Tal Niv for her careful reading and translation of the original Israeli court decision (referenced in this blog post), and to the CC Israel team for their assistance!
Comments Off on Belgian and Israeli Courts Grant Remedies to CC LicensorsNew federal education fund makes available $2 billion to create OER resources in community colleges
The Department of Labor and the Department of Education today announced a new education fund that will grant $2 billion to create OER materials for career training programs in community colleges. According to Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program (TAACCCT) will invest $2 billion over the next four years into grants that will “provide community colleges and other eligible institutions of higher education with funds to expand and improve their ability to deliver education and career training programs.” The full program announcement (PDF) states that all the resources created using these funds must be released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license:
In order to further the goal of career training and education and encourage innovation in the development of new learning materials, as a condition of the receipt of a Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant (“Grant”), the Grantee will be required to license to the public (not including the Federal Government) all work created with the support of the grant (“Work”) under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (“License”). This License allows subsequent users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the copyrighted work and requires such users to attribute the work in the manner specified by the Grantee. Notice of the License shall be affixed to the Work. For more information on this License, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0.
The program supports President Obama’s goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020 by helping to increase the number of workers who attain degrees, certificates, and other industry-recognized credentials. The first round of funding will be $500 million over the next year. Applications to the solicitation are now open, and will be due April 21, 2011.
Cathy Casserly, incoming CEO of Creative Commons, said, “This exciting program signifies a massive leap forward in the sharing of education and training materials. Resources licensed under CC BY can be freely used, remixed, translated, and built upon, and will enable collaboration between states, organizations, and businesses to create high quality OER. This announcement also communicates a commitment to international sharing and cooperation, as the materials will be available to audiences worldwide via the CC license.”
Beth Noveck, professor of law and former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Director of the White House Open Government Initiative, said, “The decision to make the work product of $2 billion in federally funded grants free for others to reuse represents a historic step forward for open education. The Departments of Labor and Education are to be congratulated for adopting more open grantmaking practices to ensure that taxpayer money funds the widest possible distribution of this important job-training courseware.”
Congratulations to The Department of Labor, The Department of Education, and others involved in crafting this important, innovative program. Creative Commons is committed to leveraging this opportunity to create a multiplier effect for public dollars to be used on open, reuseable quality content.
Addendum:
Where new learning materials are created using grant funds, those materials must be made available under CC BY. However, it is not a requirement that all the TAACCCT grant funds be spent on the creation of learning materials. We’ve also updated the title of this post to reflect this clarification, which before read U.S. Department of Labor and Department of Education commit $2-billion to create open educational resources for community colleges and career training.
Second Addendum:
See our page about Creative Commons and TAACCCT for further information.
The Right to Research Coalition's Nick Shockey: Open Education and Policy
Nick Shockey is the Director of the Right to Research Coalition (R2RC) and the Director of Student Advocacy at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). The R2RC is an international alliance of 31 graduate and undergraduate student organizations, representing nearly 7 million students, that promotes an open scholarly publishing system based on the belief that no student should be denied access to the research they need for their education because their institution cannot afford the often high cost of scholarly journals. We spoke to Nick about similarities in the open access and open educational resources movements, the worldwide student movement in support of access to scholarly research, and the benefits of adopting Creative Commons tools for open access literature.
Nick Shockey by Right To Research Coalition / CC BY
“It all started in a hotel room in Paris,” explains Shockey, who while studying abroad at Oxford and on a brief trip to France happened to catch a CNN special about MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) program. Nick was immediately impressed by the idea of OCW, and upon his return to Trinity University campaigned to get his school to implement a similar program. For a number of reasons, OCW didn’t catch on at Trinity, but the experience Shockey gained in advocating for it provided him with two crucial pieces that led to his work at SPARC: a deep interest in opening up the tools of education, and an introduction to Diane Graves, Trinity’s University Librarian and then SPARC Steering Committee member. Shockey began advocating for open access to research at Trinity, and convinced the student government to pass a resolution supporting the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), as well as a later resolution endorsing the Student Statement on the Right to Research. The statement calls for students, researchers, universities, and research funders to make academic research openly available to all. These principles formed the foundation for what was to become the Right to Research Coalition.
Growth of R2RC
In the summer after Shockey moved to Washington D.C., he was able to add new signatories to the Student Statement on the Right to Research, including the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS) and the National Graduate Caucus of the Canadian Federation of Students. It soon became clear that a larger impact could be made by organizing as a coalition that actively advocated for and educated students about open access, and Nick joined SPARC full time to lead the Right to Research Coalition.
R2RC has grown to include 31 member organizations and now represents nearly 7 million students worldwide. “The incredible diversity of our membership speaks to how important access to research is to students,” says Shockey. R2RC’s members range in size from groups with less than a hundred students to organizations with more than a million. But Nick notes that all the member groups have two things in common: they believe students should have the benefit of the full scholarly record (not just the fraction they or their institution can afford), and they recognize that the Internet has made unfettered access possible by driving down the marginal cost to distribute knowledge virtually to zero.
Federal open access advocacy
SPARC and the Right to Research Coalition have been supportive of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a law which would require 11 U.S. government agencies with annual output research expenditures over $100 million to make manuscripts of journal articles stemming from research funded by that agency publicly available via the Internet. While FRPAA didn’t pass in 2010, Shockey’s very happy with the remarkable progress made, which culminated last year in the Congressional hearing on the issue of public access to federally funded research. Shockey, colleague Julia Mortyakova, and R2RC members have been advocating in support of FRPAA in various ways, such as letter-writing campaigns and in-person office visits. Shockey estimates his membership has reached out to well over two hundred Congressional offices.
Student support for OA around the world
Shockey describes that the current situation of limited access to academic research is a widespread problem that affects students all around the world. But, he explains that the real difference isn’t between the United States and the rest of the world, but between the developed and the developing world. “Paying $30 for access to one article is expensive even for many researchers in the U.S.,” says Nick, “but when you realize that $30 is an entire average month’s wage in Malawi, you can see the huge disparities in access faced by huge swaths of people around the world.”
At the end of last summer, R2RC began a concerted effort to expand their coalition to incorporate international student groups, and launched their Access Around the World blog series to feature stories and activities from students across the globe. In fall 2010, Shockey pitched the importance for student access to scholarly research to the European Medical Students’ Association’s General Assembly in Athens and the European Students’ Conference in Berlin. “The students understood the issue right away and have gotten involved immediately,” says Nick. The President of the European Medical Students’ Association has already made a presentation on Open Access and the R2RC at a major international medical conference, and just this month, the coalition welcomed the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations (IFMSA), the world’s largest medical student organization, which operates in 97 countries around the world.
Access is crippled by cost; OA enables novel downstream benefits
The high cost to users to access academic journals and educational materials is a criticism shared by advocates of open access (OA) and open educational resources (OER). Scholarly journal prices have increased at 200% the level of inflation, similar to that of college textbook prices. Shockey believes that the that the greatest value of open access is to help knock down the prohibitive barriers that high prices pose to individual users. “A singe U.S. university we studied spent about $900,000 for only 96 journal subscriptions–and that was at a well-funded school,” says Shockey. “At less wealthy institutions, or those in the developing world, the price barriers often prove insurmountable. Students and researchers must make do with what their school can afford rather than what they need.”
Nick explains that through open access, the entire scholarly record could be available for anyone to read and build upon, leading to innumerable public benefits. But he’s most excited by the uses of open access scholarship we can’t even think of at the moment. “Lawrence Lessig points out that the real ‘secret sauce’ of the Internet is that you don’t need anyone’s permission to innovate on it,” says Shockey, “and I believe open access will finally bring this ability to academic research.” Nick describes a world of open access in which researchers will not only be able to read any article, but also be permitted to perform semantic text mining to uncover trends no one person could discover and connect together. But for this promise to be fulfilled, he reinforces that researchers need access to the entire scholarly record, not just a selected subset, and the rights necessary to reuse these articles in new and interesting ways.
Open access and Creative Commons
Shockey explained that Creative Commons plays a crucial role within the OA movement by providing a standard suite of prepackaged open content licenses. “To make an obvious point,” he said, “very few researchers are also copyright lawyers, and the CC licenses make it simple for scholars and journals to make their articles openly available. CC also helps prevents a patchwork system where it’s unclear which uses are allowed and which are not.” Nick notes that this sort of ambiguity can be very harmful–particularly to reuse of content, so it’s important that the open access community leverages CC to ensure access and communicate rights.
Shockey says that the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license has become the gold standard for open access journals. In general, scholars want recognition for their work, and the CC BY license ensures attribution to the author while allowing anyone to read, download, copy, print, distribute, and reuse their work without restriction. Shockey notes that several studies have shown a strong increase in article views and citations when an article is made openly available. “This makes intuitive sense,” Nick says. “If an article is available for more people to read and build upon, it’s unsurprising that it will also tend to be cited more often. Given the importance of citation counts in academic advancement, the citation increase can be an important benefit that flows from open licensing.”
OA support via the university
Open access (and increasingly, OER) initiatives at universities have been promoted in part through the university library. For example, at some schools librarians help educate faculty and students about the options available to them for scholarly publishing, including administering the Scholar’s Copyright Addendum. Shockey thinks that the library is a natural central organizing venue for OA and OER work, and meshes well with the library’s fundamental mission to provide their community with access to the educational resources they need. Nick also noted that libraries are perfectly positioned to play an OA/OER organizing role because they are one of the only institutions that reaches every department and every member of the campus community. Shockey said that some libraries have already taken the lead by supporting initiatives such as the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE), which sets aside money to pay for the publication fees that some open access journals charge, in order to help transition to an open model.
OA and OER working together
Open access advocates argue that access to scholarly literature should not be limited to scientists and academics, but available to patients, parents, students at all levels, entrepreneurs, and others. Shockey believes that since the OA and OER movements are both working to enable free access to the tools of education, it’s important to explore the ways in which these movements can work together. Even though the R2RC is centered on open access, it’s begun to weave OER into its messaging alongside open data and open science. Nick thinks it’s important for R2RC members to see the larger network in which they work. “When we hit roadblocks in one area,” said Shockey, “there are often opportunities in others, and advancing one of these pieces (be it OA, OER, open data, open video, etc) opens the door for further progress in other areas. Furthermore, once you’ve convinced someone about one of these issues, be it a friend, colleague, or the U.S. Congress, it’s much easier to engage them on the others.”
Shockey is optimistic with regard to the future of the student open access movement, but stresses the need to move ahead with the clear vision that advancements in education, science, and scholarship require access to raw research materials. “We must always remember what it is we’re fighting for,” said Shockey, “academic research is the raw material upon which not only education but also scientific and scholarly advancement depend. When we allow these crucial resources to be locked away, it hinders the entire mission of the Academy – student learning suffers, scholarly research is impeded, and scientific discoveries are slowed.” Nick says that widespread open access promises to benefit science and scholarship in radical ways that are almost unimaginable today. “Open access will improve how we teach, learn, and solve problems in ways that are impossible within a closed system.”
While there are many ways to get involved with the Open Access movement, Shockey stressed that the most important was simply to learn about this issue of access to research and start conversations with friends, colleagues, mentors, and students to raise awareness. The R2RC website has an individual version of their Student Statement on the Right to Research open for anyone to sign, as well as a host of other education and advocacy resources for those interested in Open Access.
Comments Off on The Right to Research Coalition's Nick Shockey: Open Education and PolicyAn Island: CC-Licensed Film, Public-Private Screenings Announced
Music and film lovers take note – An Island, a beautiful new film by Vincent Moon featuring Danish band Efterklang, is very quickly nearing public release. A new teaser for the film was released today along with an announcement describing the “Private-Public Screenings” of the film:
Efterklang and Vincent Moon welcome all our listeners and followers to host their own screenings of An Island.
We call these screenings Private-Public Screenings and the rules are very simple.
- The screenings need to have free entrance
- The screenings need to be public.
- The screenings need to have a minimum capacity of 5 people
- The screenings need to be verified by Efterklang & Vincent Moon and only screenings that are featured on www.anisland.cc are official Private-Public Screenings
Moon and Efterkland hope to create “a free and inspiring distribution method for [the] film” – as such, An Island is CC BY-NC-SA licensed (like all of Moon’s current work), allowing the free sharing and reuse of the film for non-commercial purposes.
More info on hosting your own screening is available here.
Comments Off on An Island: CC-Licensed Film, Public-Private Screenings AnnouncedNature Publishing Group expands support for Creative Commons
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Creative Commons are pleased to announce an ongoing agreement to support the work of Creative Commons (CC). NPG today pledges an annual donation to CC. This will be equivalent to $20 for every article processing charge (APC) paid for publication in any of the 20 journals owned by NPG with an open access option, up to a maximum of $100,000 a year.
“It’s imperative that those who contribute true value in the communication of the results of research have their rights protected while promoting access as far as possible,” says Philip Campbell, Editor-in-Chief of Nature and Nature Publishing Group. “Creative Commons is a key contributor to that ethos, and I am delighted that we at Nature Publishing Group will be adding our support in this way.”
This builds on the announcement last week that NPG will make a donation to CC of $20 per APC for articles published in Scientific Reports, its newest open access publication. NPG has kick-started its wider support with a donation of $15,560 to CC’s current funding drive. This is equivalent to $20 per APC for all 778 open access papers published by NPG, from when it started offering open access publishing options to its authors in 2005, to the end of 2010.
“NPG is taking this step as part of our ongoing commitment to open access,” says Jason Wilde, Business Development Director at NPG. “We feel that it is important to support the legal framework behind open access, particularly given that we and many other publishers rely on the work of CC to license open access content.”
As of January 2011, NPG publishes 45 journals that have an open access option, or are entirely open access. Twenty are wholly owned by the publisher, and it is these journals that the CC agreement will apply to. For each APC paid on these journals, NPG will donate $20 to CC. NPG is currently in discussion with its academic and society partners, and with their agreement expects to expand the program to society-owned journals in the coming months.
“NPG’s commitment to making knowledge available to share and build upon is commendable all on its own – I’m thrilled that the company is taking the innovative next step of financially supporting Creative Commons’ work. CC’s tools make sharing easy and legal, and NPG’s support for what we do demonstrates that it is deeply dedicated to realizing the potential of open access.” commented Cathy Casserly, CEO, Creative Commons.
Authors of the research paper concerned will be eligible for complimentary membership of the CC network. Joining CC gives authors access to a network of other individuals who share a belief in the power of open systems to enhance innovation. Creating profiles on the CC network allows authors to expose their work to an international community of open access supporters and leading thinkers. To claim their membership, authors simply need to contact CC with the DOI of their article. This membership offer is retrospective, and open to all authors of every open access article published in NPG journals from 2005 to the end of 2010.
NPG now offers an open access option on 51% of its portfolio of 88 journals. In addition, NPG encourages self-archiving, in line with its license to publish, and offers a free manuscript deposition service to PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central on 43 titles.
About Nature Publishing Group (NPG):
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is a publisher of high impact scientific and medical information in print and online. NPG publishes journals, online databases and services across the life, physical, chemical and applied sciences and clinical medicine.
Focusing on the needs of scientists, Nature (founded in 1869) is the leading weekly, international scientific journal. In addition, for this audience, NPG publishes a range of Nature research journals and Nature Reviews journals, plus a range of prestigious academic journals including society-owned publications. Online, nature.com provides over 5 million visitors per month with access to NPG publications and online databases and services, including Nature News and NatureJobs plus access to Nature Network and Nature Education’s Scitable.com.
Scientific American is at the heart of NPG’s newly-formed consumer media division, meeting the needs of the general public. Founded in 1845, Scientific American is the oldest continuously published magazine in the US and the leading authoritative publication for science in the general media. Together with scientificamerican.com and 16 local language editions around the world it reaches over 3 million consumers and scientists. Other titles include Scientific American Mind and Spektrum der Wissenschaft in Germany.
Throughout all its businesses NPG is dedicated to serving the scientific and medical communities and the wider scientifically interested general public. Part of Macmillan Publishers Limited, NPG is a global company with principal offices in London, New York and Tokyo, and offices in cities worldwide including Boston, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Delhi, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Madrid, Barcelona, Munich, Heidelberg, Basingstoke, Melbourne, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul and Washington DC. For more information, please go to www.nature.com.
About Creative Commons (CC):
Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, Omidyar Network, The Rockefeller Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as members of the public. For more information about Creative Commons, visit http://creativecommons.org.
ePSIplatform Blog Series on Creative Commons and Public Sector Information
The following is cross-posted from the blog of the European Public Sector Information Platform (ePSIplatform). ePSIplatform is a comprehensive portal showcasing research and projects working to stimulate and promote public sector information (PSI) re-use and open data initiatives in Europe. Creative Commons is pleased to contribute a series of blog posts discussing the role of CC tools for use in public sector information.
Creative Commons’ (CC) suite of licenses and public domain tools have set a global standard for legally facilitating maximum re-use of information, where re-use (access, collaboration, dissemination, follow-on innovations, business and community ecosystems, etc.) of information is desired — as has particularly been the case with public sector information (PSI).
This ought to be of little surprise, as open licensing is completely aligned with the interests of governments in encouraging re-use of PSI, as expressed in EU Directive 2003/98/EC and similarly around the world. More broadly, there is great interest in open licenses for publicly funded information, including various kinds of cultural, educational, and research information. Across these broad categories stakeholders have realized again and again that if rights statements are confusing or not present, re-use of information will be suboptimal. Implementing CC is the solution.
In this short blog series, we will not describe the basics of the CC license suite and public domain tools, nor their burgeoning adoption by governments throughout Europe and around the world–follow the links for a review.
Instead, for the expert ePSIplatform readership (many thanks to ePSIplatform for the opportunity) we will highlight some useful “things you may not know” and point out some “things you might think you know, but are incorrect” about legal and technical aspects of CC tools — ones particularly pertinent to PSI adoption that have surfaced repeatedly in discussions CC and institutions in our global affiliate network have had with governments and publicly funded institutions, including in the course of providing implementation assistance for governments seeking to share. Following are some of the things we’ll discuss briefly in upcoming posts:
While all CC licenses require attribution, it is built in a sophisticated and flexible manner: non-endorsement, right to request removal of attribution, attribution to a publisher or funder, appropriate to medium, attribution links, and technical support for making attribution easier and more useful.
How the CC0 public domain dedication works robustly across jurisdictions, including its minimal license fallback that effectively works like our attribution-only license, and how the same technology that makes attribution under our licenses easier and more useful also makes non-legally-mandated citation of public domain materials also easier and more useful.
Jurisdiction and CC licenses: how that works legally (all CC tools are designed to apply worldwide). Also the leadership role of CC affiliate network jurisdiction projects in PSI.
How CC0 and CC licenses are being used for data (both are used extensively for PSI); also how they treat sui generis rights (separately, CC will be issuing an in-depth contemporary statement on this topic in the near future), what this means for PSI, and related improvements we’re exploring for an eventual version 4.0 of the CC license suite.
We are also developing a topic report on PSI and CC tools, to be published at the conclusion of this series. The report will include references to much of the excellent material published on PSI and CC over the last several years.
Feel free to leave a comment on this post if you have burning questions about the items above, or requests for other points to be covered in this series or the topic report. As always, if you have questions about CC licenses and public domain tools, we hope you’ll come to the source for the official story.
Comments Off on ePSIplatform Blog Series on Creative Commons and Public Sector InformationCC Website Changes
If you watch our website carefully, you’ll notice a few changes today. Some of those changes are small, and some are fairly significant, and we’ll be making more changes later in 2011.
We’re making these changes because we’ve received feedback — from our community of users, friends, supporters, and more — that the current set of web properties we have here at Creative Commons isn’t working as well as it could. Our websites have always emphasized using Creative Commons tools, or finding Creative Commons-licensed works. But we haven’t always made it easy to understand exactly how we are making possible the full potential of the internet via open licensing.
Today’s changes mark the first step towards fixing that problem.
The first change you’ll notice is that we’re putting learning about CC into a featured spot on the home page, right next to where you can choose a license for your works.
Another change is that we are making it easy to see that we work across culture, education, and science, instead of putting those as links in a sidebar or even onto different domains, as we have done in the past with education and science. On each of those pages, we put in a “carousel” of users and implementations that draw on our growing repository of CC case studies. All of our work is global across all three domains, so we’ve also updated and prominently feature our international affiliates network page.
Regarding science, we’re redirecting the old Science Commons front page to http://creativecommons.org/science. This is part of our comprehensive integration of science into the core of Creative Commons — on a par with culture and education. We’re still figuring out exactly how to migrate all of the content inside the sciencecommons.org domain, so for now we’re leaving that content up and linking to it from the new page.
We made it easier to find and learn about the licenses themselves, and we made our vision and mission explicit on the About Creative Commons page.
Last, we put a “fat footer” into place at the bottom, so that visitors and experienced CC users could rapidly access key parts of the site without having to dig around and click around in a site map.
This is just the beginning of the process. We’re working on a much more complete site redesign as part of our strategic plan for 2011, but we wanted to get these fixes implemented immediately. For those of you following CC’s progress over the long term, note that our previous significant website refresh came nearly two years ago. We will be tracking the impact of the changes through our website analytics, and we welcome feedback on how you use the site, what you’d like to see, and how you think we can make our website more effective throughout the course of the year.
3 Comments »CC REL by Example
The following is cross-posted from the CC Labs blog. Creative Commons technical team blogs at CC Labs about metadata, emerging standards, demos, prototypes, and Creative Commons’ technical infrastructure.
You may have noticed that the copy-and-paste HTML you get from the CC license chooser includes some strange attributes you’re probably not familiar with. That is RDFa metadata, and it allows for the CC license deeds, search engines, Open Attribute, and other tools to discover metadata about your work and generate attribution HTML. Many platforms have implemented CC REL metadata in their CC license marks, such as Connexions and Flickr, and it’s our recommended way to mark works with a CC license.
In an effort to make CC license metadata (or CC REL metadata) much easier to implement, we’ve created CC REL by Example. It includes many example HTML pages, as well as explanations and links to more information.
We’re hoping this guide will serve as a useful set of examples for developers and publishers who want to publish metadata for CC licensed works. Even if you just use CC licenses for your own content, now is a great time to take a first step into structured data and include information about how you’d like to be attributed.
You can find the source to the guide in git. Feedback and suggestions can be sent to [email protected].
Comments Off on CC REL by Examplenext page