The UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Recommendation was unanimously adopted on November 25 by 193 UNESCO member states at the 40th UNESCO General Conference. This milestone offers a unique opportunity to advance open education around the world.

Why does it matter? This Recommendation is an official UNESCO instrument that gives national governments a specific list of recommendations to support open education in their countries and to collaborate with other nations.

Creative Commons is thrilled with this important milestone! We’ve been working on open education with UNESCO, the Commonwealth of Learning, and multiple national government and institutional partners for over 15 years. CC was on the drafting committee for both the 2012 UNESCO OER Declaration and the 2019 UNESCO OER Recommendation. In 2015, CC worked with UNESCO on its Open Access Repository. CC also attended and keynoted the 2017 UNESCO OER Global Congress. 

Recognizing the importance of the UNESCO OER Recommendation, a coalition of organizations active in advancing open education globally has joined forces to support its implementation. Coalition partners, in alphabetical order, are:

• Commonwealth of Learning
• Creative Commons
• International Council for Open and Distance Education
• Jožef Stefan Institute
• Knowledge 4 All
• Open Education Global (formerly Open Education Consortium)
• Slovenian National Commission for UNESCO
• SPARC Europe
• SPARC North America
  

The coalition will collectively leverage these organizations’ strengths and expertise, combining and coordinating efforts to create and deliver comprehensive resources and services in support of implementing the Recommendation across all UNESCO member states. The coalition will meet in early 2020 to develop a list of services, materials, activities, and communication plans that we will use to support national governments. Implementation support will be focused on providing assistance for the Recommendation:

Five areas of action:

• Building capacity of stakeholders to create, access, use, adapt and redistribute OER
• Developing supportive policy
• Encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER
• Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER
• Facilitating international cooperation
  

Monitoring and reporting:

• Deploying appropriate research programmes, tools and indicators to measure effectiveness
• Collecting, presenting, and disseminating progress, good practices innovations and research reports
• Strategies for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness and long-term financial efficiency of OER

For more information contact:

Dr. Cable Green
Interim CEO & Director of Open Education
Creative Commons
cable@ creativecommons dot org

Jennryn Wetzler
Assistant Director of Open Education
Creative Commons
jennryn@ creativecommons dot org

The coalition also welcomes questions, requests, and suggestions using this form.

CC is excited to work together with stakeholders around the world in building open education capacity and effectiveness. Together we can fulfill the aims and objectives of the UNESCO OER Recommendation and make significant progress in achieving access to quality education for all. Let’s get to work.

The post A Coalition to Support Implementation of the UNESCO OER Recommendation appeared first on Creative Commons.

To date, the CC Certificate has only been available in English. However, thanks to the incredible efforts of CC Global Network members, the CC Certificate course content (e.g., readings, articles, etc.) is being translated into multiple languages.

In particular, we are proud to highlight the work of CC Network members in Italy and Saudi Arabia. Paola Corti and Lokesh Rajendran have made CC Certificate content translations available in Italian and Arabic. With these translations, over 483 million additional people around the world have access to the course content in their first language.

In addition to these translations, the first country case study was debuted today in English and Italian at the Open Education Global Conference in Italy. The country case study, titled General Principles on “Diritto d’Autore” and Related Rights in Italy provides supplementary information on the rules regulating authors’ rights in Italy.

How are these additions and translations possible?

Upon successfully completing the CC Certificate*, Paola Corti (METID – Politecnico di Milano Project Manager and Instructional Designer) and Lokesh Rajendran (National Center for e-Learning Project Manager) downloaded the CC BY course content and applied their open licensing expertise to create the first translations of the CC Certificate to meet their communities’ needs in Italy and Saudi Arabia. They licensed the works CC BY 4.0 to enable maximum reuse. Their work with METID – Politecnico di Milano colleagues (Deborah de Angelis and Laura Sinigaglia) and National Center for e-Learning’s Saudi Open Educational Content Program team members (Ahmed Al Mobarak, Saleh Al Khaliwey, Rabah Al Bawardi, Sara Mazen, and Maha Al Sheikh) took between 3-5 months to complete.

Their work exemplifies what’s possible when educational resources are openly licensed. Creative Commons has licensed its CC Certificate content CC BY with the intent of making the content as useful and accessible as possible. The CC BY license enables anyone to create adaptations (also known as derivatives), such as language translations, to better meet the needs of different audiences.

We laud these Certificate graduates for their fantastic work, and look forward to highlighting future translations of the CC Certificate content! If you are interested in this work, please contact certificates@creativecommons.org.

*The CC Certificate provides an-in depth study of Creative Commons licenses and open practices, uniquely developing participants’ open licensing proficiency and understanding of the broader context for open advocacy. The training content targets copyright law and CC legal tools, as well as the values and good practices of working in the global, shared commons. The CC Certificate is available as either a 10-week online course or a one-week, in-person training to educators and academic librarians.

 

The post Millions Now Have Access to the CC Certificate in Italian and Arabic! appeared first on Creative Commons.

This is part of a series of posts introducing the projects built by open source contributors mentored by Creative Commons during Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019. Ahmad Bilal was one of those contributors and we are grateful for his work on this project.

WordPress is one of the top platforms for creators on the internet who both produce and consume CC-licensed content. Therefore, it’s important that we are able to integrate with WordPress as seamlessly as possible in order to promote the use of CC licenses. With that in mind, we recently added new features to our WordPress plugin—which are now live!

This plugin is an attribution and marking tool. It has multiple features that allow users to publish their content on WordPress under a CC license.

Previously, WordPress blog/site owners needed to manually type out instructions specifying to their readers what content they can share and how. But this plugin makes it simple to specify which CC license a single page, post, or even a whole site/network is published under.

Installation

You can install this plugin from the WordPress.org plugin marketplace. Once installed and activated, you can change the license settings from your WordPress (WP) dashboard.

The latest features added to our plugin:

• Setting a default site license

The plugin allows a default site-wide license to avoid any confusion regarding the attribution of content. After activating the plugin, head to Settings > Creative Commons to set up the default license or to change it to one of the other CC licenses.

There are multiple options available for the license. You can add:

• Additional attribution text for a custom note
• Title and Title URL
• Author and Author URL
• Display options

This default license can be displayed either as a widget or in the footer. The widget can be pulled to any area and will display the default license.

• License blocks

Our plugin also supports WordPress’ new editor, Gutenberg. The plugin adds blocks for each CC license. You will find these blocks under a separate category.

These blocks can be used to quickly mark or attribute any page/post/image or other media. Choosing a block will provide you with fields to add details. 

In the image below, you can see how the block will look in a post.

At a glance, with the WP CC Plugin you can:

• License your site with a default license
• Display the default license in the footer or as a widget
• Display a license for the entire site, or for individual posts and pages
• License your WordPress Network (WordPress Multisite install)
• License some posts, pages, or images differently from your default license
• License posts and pages by simply including CC Gutenberg blocks for each license required

What’s next for the CC WordPress plugin?

The CC WordPress plugin is an open source project aimed at simplifying the process of applying CC licenses to content on WordPress. A few upcoming milestones include internationalization, as well as the integration of CC Search and CC Vocabulary (coming soon). 

Finally, this project is community-focused and we want your help. Do you have comments or suggestions? Maybe a few ideas for new features or thoughts about improving the user experience? Check out the plugin’s GitHub Repository and Contribution Guidelines to get started. You can also join the discussion on the #cc-dev-wordpress Slack channel or the GitHub repository. 

 

The post Introducing the Updated Creative Commons WordPress Plugin appeared first on Creative Commons.

It has come to the attention of Creative Commons that there is an increased use of CC licenses by cultural heritage institutions on photographic reproductions and 3D scans of objects such as sculptures, busts, engravings, and inscriptions, among others, that are indisputably in the public domain worldwide. A recent example is the 3000-year-old Nefertiti bust on display at the Neues Museum in Berlin that the museum licensed under BY-NC-SA. The practices vary widely, from using a CC BY license, to using our most restrictive license—CC BY-NC-ND.

Most of these objects have been in the public domain for a long time now, indeed many that have never been subject to copyright. The copyright holder is the only person that can apply a CC license to a work. If the work is in the public domain, no copyright licenses should be applied, and in the case of CC licenses, which are designed to only operate where copyright exists, the application of a CC license is ineffective. In these cases, if anything, the Public Domain Mark or the CC0 public domain dedication tool should be applied to confirm worldwide public domain status.

If the work is in the public domain, no copyright licenses should be applied, and in the case of CC licenses, which are designed to only operate where copyright exists, the application of a CC license is ineffective.

Some of these claims are being made over the 3D scans and photographic reproductions of objects, not necessarily over the objects themselves. However, digitization by itself doesn’t create copyright or similar rights because in the vast majority of jurisdictions there is no originality involved in making a faithful digital reproduction of a creative work. In most of the cases, these reproductions follow very well-established industry standards for preservation purposes. Even when these scans are the result of skilled labor, these reproductions are still insufficiently creative to be granted copyright protection almost everywhere.

In some of these cases, the application of CC licenses has been applied over contested objects, where cultural stewardship and ownership of these objects is the subject of legal, political, and diplomatic discussions. Creative Commons is exploring this issue and recognizes that CC licenses do not sufficiently address these issues. However, in these cases, it is particularly meaningful to pay attention to the cultural prerogatives that enure to the communities of origin, including decisions on digitization and access restrictions and conditions.¹

Creative Commons licenses are tools to allow users to better understand what permissions are being granted to the public by the creator of the original work. When a CC license is misapplied, the ability of CC licenses to be a standard signal for communicating copyright permissions is undermined. Mislabelling works creates confusion among re-users of works and limits the rights of the public to benefit from the global commons.

We acknowledge that in some cases cultural heritage institutions use CC licenses in order to get credit for their work or to indicate the provenance of the digital surrogates. There are better, more appropriate technical tools to achieve that goal, including metadata and machine readability standards.

Lastly, we understand the concerns over revenue and profit that some cultural heritage institutions express when evaluating open access policies. However, claiming copyright over public domain works and successful revenue strategies are different conversations that don’t belong in the same space. If anything, there is a growing amount of evidence that shows that the associated costs for licensing images dwarf the potential benefits or revenue streams for licensing images.²

Creative Commons licenses are not tools that should be used to limit the possibility of discovery, sharing, and re-use of the public domain. Cultural heritage institutions should embrace open access policies as part of their institutional missions to grant access to culture and information to the public.

Creative Commons is making efforts to offer more training and education activities to cultural heritage institutions on open access. We are also working in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation on a Declaration on Open Access for Cultural Heritage, that we expect to launch at our Global Summit in May 2020. Engage with us in this conversation at @openglam.

 

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References

1. Pavis, Mathilde and Wallace, Andrea, Response to the 2018 Sarr-Savoy Report: Statement on Intellectual Property Rights and Open Access Relevant to the Digitization and Restitution of African Cultural Heritage and Associated Materials (March 25, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3378200 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3378200

2. Crews, Kenneth D., Museum Policies and Art Images: Conflicting Objectives and Copyright Overreaching. Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal, Vol. 22, p. 795, 2012; Tanner S. Reproduction charging models & rights policy for digital images in American art museums: A Mellon Foundation funded study. Online: King’s College London, 2004. 57 p.; Foteini Valeonti, Andrew Hudson-Smith, Melissa Terras & Chrysanthi Zarkali, Reaping the Benefits of Digitisation: Pilot study exploring revenue generation from digitised collections through technological innovation, Proceedings of EVA London 2018, UK.

The post Reproductions of Public Domain Works Should Remain in the Public Domain appeared first on Creative Commons.

When governments choose to use Creative Commons licenses to preserve and share cultural knowledge, like Indigenous languages, it illustrates how our licenses can help create a more accessible and equitable world. 

Recently, CC India’s Global Network Representative (GNC) Subhashish Panigrahi brought to our attention that the Indian state of Odisha licensed 21 dictionaries—in all 21 Indigenous languages that are spoken in the province—under CC BY. This opens them up for adaptation, distribution, and remixing by anyone.

Download or view all of the dictionaries here. 

Global Voices underlined the particular significance of this announcement in a tweet, posting: “India is home to over 780 languages and approximately 220-250 languages have died over the last 50 years.” 

The Indian state of Odisha publishes online dictionaries in 21 indigenous languages https://t.co/MCZ6NkLuDG India is home to over 780 languages and approximately 220-250 languages have died over the last 50 years. pic.twitter.com/zx1t8ROA1a

— Global Voices (@globalvoices) October 24, 2019

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We couldn’t be happier to see CC licenses being used to facilitate translation projects and sharing that could ultimately help protect Indigenous languages, knowledge, and culture. We hope that other governments and policy makers around the world will take heed and similarly make valuable content and tools like these dictionaries openly available to the public. 

If you work with a government or institution that needs consultation on how to use CC licenses, please email us at info@creativecommons.org.

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