It’s Open Access Week, the yearly global event to raise broad awareness about the opportunities and benefits for open access to scientific and scholarly research. Open Access Week—now in its 10th year—also mobilises action for progressive policy changes so that researchers and the public get immediate online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and reuse those results.

This year’s theme is “Open In Order To…”—an invitation to answer the question of what concrete benefits can be realized by making scholarly outputs openly available.

Support our efforts for Open Access – sign up!

In addition to advocating for open access to scientific research, we should also recognize the necessity for improving access to the laws, regulations, and standards that govern our societies and impact our lives everyday.

There are several organisations working in this crucial area of open access. In March we highlighted the work of the Free Law Project, an initiative “to provide free, public, and permanent access to primary legal materials on the Internet for educational, charitable, and scientific purposes to the benefit of the general public and the public interest.”

Public information advocate Carl Malamud has been fighting for years to make sure that the public has access to the law. His project Public.Resource.Org focuses on digitizing and making accessible the works of the U.S. Federal Government, which by statute are mostly in the public domain. But Carl has received some staunch opposition to his work, particularly around the publishing of technical standards. Oftentimes these standards are created by private entities and then “incorporated by reference” into various public laws, such as fire codes. Malamud was sued by standards bodies for copyright infringement because he posted the standards online.

Carl has also been actively challenging state-level rules that forbid the open publishing of the legal code. A few years ago he purchased a hard copy of the Georgia legal code, digitized it, and published it online. In response, the state of Georgia sent a cease and desist to Malamud and an initial court ruling has sided with Georgia claiming that Malamud’s action infringed on the exclusive copyright of the state of Georgia. They sent a cease and desist to Malamud and Public.Resource.Org is appealing the ruling.

Another longstanding impediment to open access to court case information is the PACER database. PACER stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records; the website is an electronic public access service of United States federal court documents. PACER is a strange, antiquated, and to some, absurd website, charging users a fee of $0.10 for every document downloaded from its site. All of these materials are documents of public record as a part of the U.S. court system.

RECAP (“PACER” spelled backwards) is a clever browser plugin developed at Princeton in 2009 that captures documents that have already been accessed by a paying customer and displays them for free to subsequent searchers. However, there have also been a few class action court cases brought against the U.S. Government claiming that the PACER database fails to provide users with free access to judicial opinions, thus in violation of the E-Government Act of 2002. In a recent case, D’Apuzzo v. United States of America (Civil Action No. 16-62769-Civ-Scola), a District Court judge denied the government’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

Follow along with the Creative Commons blog, Twitter, and Facebook this week, and be sure to tag and share your posts with the #OAweek hashtag.

 

The post Open In Order To…Guarantee Access to the Laws That Govern Us appeared first on Creative Commons.

It’s Open Access Week, the yearly global event to raise broad awareness about the opportunities and benefits for open access to scientific and scholarly research. Open Access Week—now in its 10th year—also mobilises action for progressive policy changes so that researchers and the public get immediate online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and reuse those results.

This year’s theme is “Open In Order To…”—an invitation to answer the question of what concrete benefits can be realized by making scholarly outputs openly available.

Support our efforts for Open Access – sign up!

Yesterday we hosted group discussion via Slack chat on the timely topic of preprints—an important and growing practice within scholarly communication with major implications for open access publishing. You can view the full chat history in the #cc-openaccess channel on the Creative Commons Slack. We are especially interested in how preprint servers are handling the issue of open licensing.

Generally speaking, a preprint is a version of a manuscript that’s made available before peer-review and publication, distributed to receive early feedback. The discussions around preprints can be quite complex and vary between communities of practice. Preprints are important because they are a mechanism for collaboration and could even speed up the process of research. As we learned during the Slack chat, apparently citations of preprints date back to at least 1922!

In the chat, we asked how universities view preprints from a tenure and promotion standpoint. Do researchers get recognized for sharing work earlier as preprints? We know that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is permitting researchers to submit preprints and draft research in asking for funding, and recommending the use of CC licensing to share such materials, where appropriate. There are some universities that are taking into account the sharing of preprints in their hiring and promotion policies. And even though many institutions do not yet formally recognize preprints as contributing to their tenure review process, ASAPbio is tracking stories that indicate that sharing preprints can help land a job.

We discussed how preprints approach open licensing. Do they allow it? Encourage it? Require it? What sorts of things do you think preprint authors should know about Creative Commons licensing? For the most part, it seems that CC licensed preprints work within the existing scholarly publishing system. There are some projects to track the preprint policies of academic journals. Initially there was concern that commercial journals would refuse to publish an article if its preprint had been previously shared under a CC license, and some commercial publishers do not allow it (or make it very difficult to do). But apparently publishers like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) have subsequently changed course—pulling back on their restrictive policy and permitting the publishing of preprints shared under CC licenses.

Participants in the chat agreed that preprints should allow (but not necessarily require) Creative Commons licensing, and that the author should choose what they do with their work as the copyright holder. We were also pointed to an interesting blog post on the topic of author licensing choices in preprints.

We also talked about the potential for preprints to share other types of information outside of relatively advanced research papers. For example, data sets, research notes, and even code could be shared under the preprint model. One question pertinent to the sharing of these other types of content is the appropriate open license for doing so. For example, software should be shared as free and open-source software, not under a CC license.

Finally, we wondered what the future holds for preprints within the scholarly publishing ecosystem. In a recent interview, biologist and PLOS co-founder Mike Eisen said:

The most important thing to do now is to get publishers – commercial and non-profit – out of the process. The whole industry is unnecessary and needlessly cumbersome and expensive. We should all just publish in places like bioRxiv (assuming its software gets better and produces finished documents people are happy to read) and do all peer review post publication. There should be little or no money transacted in the process – the infrastructure should be subsidized so it’s free to both publish and access all the content.

The question is, are preprints the logical conclusion to this because they accelerate scientific research without the added baggage and cost of the scholarly publishing system? Some people agreed that the value that publishers bring is in the facilitation of peer review, curation of resources–not just making content available. Essentially, that publishing will become even moreso a service model across the publishing life cycle, and thus less of a tool that grants access (or restricts it). But of course, there are a lot of things that need to be addressed in concert, including the ongoing reliance of the scientific community on power branding of “high impact” journals, and also the challenges of academic promotion.

Follow along with the Creative Commons blog, Twitter, and Facebook this week, and be sure to tag and share your posts with the #OAweek hashtag.

The post Open In Order To…Accelerate Research and Scientific Discoveries appeared first on Creative Commons.

It’s Open Access Week, the yearly global event to raise broad awareness about the opportunities and benefits for open access to scientific and scholarly research. Open Access Week—now in its 8th year—also mobilises action for progressive policy changes so that researchers and the public get immediate online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and reuse those results.

This year’s theme is “Open In Order To…”—an invitation to answer the question of what concrete benefits can be realized by making scholarly outputs openly available.

Support our efforts for Open Access – sign up!

Diego Gómez is a scientist from Colombia who for the last three years has been criminally prosecuted for sharing an academic paper online. When Diego was a student in conservation biology in Colombia, he had poor access to many of the resources and databases that would help him conduct his research. He found and shared an academic paper online so that others could read and learn from it, just as he did. Gómez didn’t get permission to reshare the article, and subsequently was prosecuted for copyright infringement. He faced up to eight years in prison.

In May 2017 Gómez was acquitted of criminal charges. But within days of the ruling, the author’s lawyer appealed the decision, meaning that even after several years of unnecessary (and expensive) criminal proceedings, Diego’s case continues to the appellate court.

Why is a student being prosecuted for sharing knowledge? Does his potential punishment fit the crime? Can we claim to support the noble practices of teaching, learning, and scientific inquiry while permitting our laws to harshly punish the sharing of information?

Instead of prosecuting students for sharing knowledge, governments and communities  should be encouraging the free exchange of scientific information by reinforcing positive norms around scholarship and collaboration, promoting open access to research, and eliminating out of control copyright remedies that serve no reasonable public interest purpose. Furthermore, we should encourage our governments to boost national legislation that promotes the release of public funded research results as open access.

A crowdfunding campaign was launched a few months ago to help defray the ongoing legal expenses. The campaign—titled Compartir no es delito: Sharing Is Not A Crime—has raised about $7000. You can still contribute!

The long reach of copyright inhibits access to information and obstructs fundamental user rights. From suing a student for downloading academic journal articles to issuing millions of copyright takedown notices to scholars for sharing their own research, large rights holders organizations continue to wield copyright law to punish those who attempt to do what comes naturally for them—sharing.

If open access were the default for scholarly communication, there would be no cases like Diego’s. We could focus on closing the research practice gap between developed and developing countries, since the elevated costs for scientific databases are impossible to cover for developing countries in science practice. Academic research would be free to access and available under open licenses that would legally enable the kind of sharing that is so crucial for enabling collaboration and supporting a democratized scientific progress. Scientists like Diego shouldn’t have to risk severe penalties for helping colleagues access the research they need. When research is shared freely and openly, we all benefit.

Follow along with the Creative Commons blog, Twitter, and Facebook this week, and be sure to tag and share your posts with the #OAweek hashtag.

The post Open In Order To…Promote Knowledge Sharing, Not Criminalize It appeared first on Creative Commons.

It’s Open Access Week, a yearly global event to raise broad awareness about the opportunities and benefits for open access to scientific and scholarly research. Open Access Week—now in its 8th year—mobilises action for progressive policy changes so that researchers and the public get immediate online access to the results of scholarly research and the right to use and reuse those results.

This year’s theme is “Open In Order To…”—an invitation to answer the question of what concrete benefits can be realized by making scholarly outputs openly available.

Support our efforts for Open Access – sign up!

For 15 years, Creative Commons licenses and legal tools have been used to share scholarly articles and data on more open terms than the standard “all rights reserved” copyright.

CC licenses provide the legal machinery that helps communicate the rights to use and reuse open access research. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals there are over 2.5 million CC licensed journal articles, with 1.5 million of those licensed under CC BY. CC licensed open access research can be translated into other languages, adapted for use as open educational resources in the classroom, or shared widely on other platforms that champion the spread of knowledge, such as Wikipedia. In addition to the licenses and public domain tools like CC0, CC-powered open access policies and practices are being adopted in a variety of different settings, such as for government funded research.

In the U.S., the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) has been reintroduced in both the House and Senate.t’s. FASTR would require those agencies that fund $100 million or more per year in external research to provide the public with online access (within 6-12 months) to the scholarly articles that are created through that funding.

Another development in the U.S. related to open access to publicly funded research and data is the OPEN Government Data Act. The bill would ensure that federal government data is “open, available, discoverable, and usable to the general public, businesses, journalists, [and] academics.” The legislation would codify the Obama administration’s 2013 Executive Order. The bills, the text of which has now been attached to the National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 2810, S. 1519), would require that “government data assets published by or for an agency shall be made available under an open license or, if not made available under an open license and appropriately released, shall be considered to be published as part of the worldwide public domain.”

Not only that, philanthropic foundations, NGOs, and intergovernmental organizations are using open licensing to share the research that they–or their grantees–are creating. For example, the open access policy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is now in effect (as of January 1, 2017), meaning that researchers that receive money from the foundation must publish their scientific papers and data online under a CC BY license, with zero embargo when it goes live.

Open access policies that promote the sharing of research and data under CC licensing is an increasingly important area for education and advocacy. We need to ensure that the outputs of publicly financed research are shared with the world under open licenses. This means that researchers, scientists, doctors, patients, and the public around the world will get get the access they deserve and need in order to be informed on current scientific research, learn about promising  medical innovations, and collaborate to solve problems. 

Follow along with the Creative Commons blog, Twitter, and Facebook this week, and be sure to tag and share your posts with the #OAweek hashtag.

The post Open In Order To…Maximize Reuse Possibilities of Research appeared first on Creative Commons.

In order to better teach open tools and practices to communities around the world, Creative Commons has developed open educational resources and a certification program called the CC Certificate. CC’s Senior Counsel Sarah Hinchliff Pearson is now leading the project with a group of researchers, writers, and instructional designers. The project is funded by the Gates Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

The CC Certificate program is a training program that leads people through the basics about the organization, copyright law, and the CC tools. The goal is to equip people with the knowledge and skills they need to advocate for and support adoption of CC licensing in their work and creative pursuits.

There are a wealth of opportunities to tailor the certificate to specific audiences. Initially we’re focusing on two groups: academic librarians and educators. The certificate for these two segments will run as a 12-week online course on Canvas, facilitated by an instructor fluent in the issues and opportunities surrounding CC licensing and open collaboration. The majority of the content will cover the basics of copyright and open licensing, and participants will be expected to choose either the academic librarian or educator track because the final unit will be domain-specific. The content will include online discussions, quizzes, and learning activities throughout to help solidify concepts and allow learners to demonstrate their understanding. The course will be entirely online, but CC may eventually offer an optional in-person session as a capstone offering at the end of the course. Upon successful completion, students will receive a certificate from Creative Commons.

Of course, the underlying course content will be freely available to the public and CC-licensed, including text, images, and videos. The content covers Creative Commons as a whole – the organization, the tools, and the movement. We are treating this as a chance to tell the full story of what CC is and what we do. The materials include sections on the basics of copyright law, many of the ins and outs of CC licenses, practical information about how to use the licenses and how to use CC-licensed work, information about the values connected to use of CC, and case studies about what it looks like in the real world. For a full preview of the course topics, see the current syllabus here.

The full beta test of the 12-week course will begin in January, with the official certification program launching after the Global Summit from April 13-15 in Toronto, Canada. We will be running one library-specific track and one education-specific track during the beta phase and will be asking participants to help us evaluate and shape the content. If you are interested in participating, please email sarah@creativecommons.org.

We expect the CC Global Network will play a crucial role in this program. In the future, we hope network members can be certified in order to help run the course in their parts of the world.

Over the course of the next year, we will be exploring customization of the project for three different audiences: GLAM professionals, lawyers, and governments. An early, abbreviated version of the certificate beta has already been delivered to more than 150 academic librarians in the US, with great success. We are anxious to expand the program to fit a greater variety of professions, and to work with and empower the future leaders of the commons. Any questions, comments, or suggestions? Get in touch with us via Slack or Twitter.

For even more CC content, please sign up for our email list.

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