This week a coalition of scholarly publishers, researchers, and nonprofit organizations launched the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a project to promote the unrestricted open access to scholarly citation data. From the website:
Citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They are primary data that provide both provenance and an explanation for how we know facts. They allow us to attribute and credit scientific contributions, and they enable the evaluation of research and its impacts. In sum, citations are the most important vehicle for the discovery, dissemination, and evaluation of all scholarly knowledge.
There’s now open citation data from 14 million scholarly papers. Both open access and subscription-based scholarly publishers are contributing to the project. These publishers include the Association for Computing Machinery, PLOS, Wiley, SAGE Publishing, Springer Nature, eLife, Taylor & Francis, and many others.
The goals of project is to promote the availability of data on citations that are “structured, separable, and open.” According to the I4OC website:
Structured means the data representing each publication and each citation instance are expressed in common, machine-readable formats, and that these data can be accessed programmatically. Separable means the citation instances can be accessed and analyzed without the need to access the source bibliographic products (such as journal articles and books) in which the citations are created. Open means the data are freely accessible and reusable.
In order to ensure that the data are freely accessible and reusable, the structured citation metadata will be published using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, which means that the data may be used without restriction. CC0 enables creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.
Congratulations to I4OC on the launch of this important initiative. We hope that the open sharing of citation data can aid in the discoverability of all types of research, and generate new and interesting connections in our understanding of scientific and scholarly works.
It’s been a big year for community at Creative Commons. At summit we’ll move ahead on the Global Network Strategy. We have identified platforms for people to start analysing and have network discussions for deeper conversations. The Global Network Strategy began at the last Global Summit in Seoul in 2015. No doubt you’ve either read the document, participated in a webinar or in person meeting or joined the Slack channel. This is the first time CC has spent time seriously looking at the affiliate network and the broader community. We heard you, we’re ready to jump in.
credit: Lara the Yellow Ladybird , Illustrated by Catherine Holtzhausen , Written by Martha Evans, Designed by Nadene Kriel, CC-BY 4.0
With all this energy, the Community & Movement track is filled with new voices as well as established members. If you want to learn how CC licenses work in the wild, be sure to visit the session with projects like Book Dash, African Storybook Initiative and Pratham in their session Addressing the Scarcity of Multilingual Reading Resources for Children.
Look out also for a discussion on CC in the South Seas: Lessons Learned in Aotearoa New Zealand from CC New Zealand Public Lead Elizabeth Heritage. CC New Zealand has always been a strong team, with effective newsletters and content, and this talk is sure to be inspiring to community members of all types.
Open Science nerds don’t worry! We’ve got you covered in Community & Movement. Brian Bot from SAGE Bionetworks will be there to share insights on their project in decentralized biomedical research ecosystems. Interested in hadron colliders? The ATLAS experiment at CERN is will be in Toronto to talk about Outreach and Education by large Scientific (or just Physics) collaborations.
Ready to get your hands dirty and dig in? Open educational resources (OER), Galleries, libraries and Museums (we call them ‘GLAM’), and copyright reform they will have their own space to discuss in depth regarding their actual challenges and how our movement will actively contribute to those spaces. No matter what your level of experience, join the conversation!
In addition, at summit we have three great discussions: one on Building a Culture of Gratitude and another called How Can we Work Together? Another exciting session is called Thinking BIG for the Commons.
Come find your people at the Community & Movement track! In the meantime, you can find me on Slack in the #cc-summit channel. Looking forward to seeing you in Toronto.
An interview with Dave Mitchell of Beautiful Trouble
After Occupy and the Arab Spring in 2011, the artist-activists of Beautiful Trouble burst on the scene with a number of seasoned professionals ready to change the dialogue by utilizing creative, radical protest. Since then, the organization has created a number of invaluable online resources for social movements through their online book (CC BY-NC-SA), technology tools, case studies, and network mapping across societal and international boundaries.
Dave Mitchell, one of the founders of Beautiful Trouble, describes their goal as to “make social movements more creative, more effective, and more likely to win,” and credits CC licensing with enabling them to adopt a modular, agile approach that contributes to their message of social good. Focusing on social movements around the world, the book, game, toolbox, and litany of online and offline resources provides a much needed dose of unity, levity, and practical focus in a divisive political era.
The Beautiful Trouble toolbox can be found online, and the organization is creating a number of new tools to support social movements, including a chatbot and a game. In addition, their network of in-person artist-activist trainers provide vital resources both online and offline to support change agents around the world.
Workshop in Oaxaca, MX. Photo by Dave Mitchell
Beautiful Trouble is a toolbox for revolution, a training manual, a collection of case studies, a network map, and more. What was the impetus to start this collection of resources? Why is it important for people to be able to access a toolbox like this online?
Beautiful Trouble emerged in 2011, the year of Occupy and the Arab Spring, and with much the same creative DNA as those flashpoints. We set out to create a common platform where people could come together to share experiences, learn from the ideas and innovations of organizers all over the world, contribute their own ideas, get inspired, get involved, make something happen.
We wanted to popularize the idea that social change isn’t about just mindlessly repeating the same tactics over and over again — but also that it isn’t rocket science. That many small groups of clowns and pranksters can change the world; indeed, maybe it’s the only thing that ever has.
While Beautiful Trouble is best known in its book form, from the beginning it has also been accessible online, where so many of us live. And because it’s modular, interlinking, and constantly expanding, it lives more comfortably online. Now we’re experimenting with letting people access the toolkit as a chatbot, accessible through various messaging apps like Telegram, Slack, and Facebook Messenger.
Beautiful Trouble Workshop in Oaxaca, MX by Dave Mitchell.
Why did you decide to license your work under CC BY-NC-SA? How does the CC licensing play into your work?
Creative Commons licensing made sense to us both politically and practically. Politically, our goal is to make social movements more creative, more effective, and more likely to win, and we believe that happens by promoting the kind of agile, creative and modular thinking that Beautiful Trouble embodies.
Basically, we want the ideas in Beautiful Trouble to become common knowledge — to be used, shared, repurposed, translated, adapted — so it made no sense to throw barriers of intellectual property in the path of that, beyond those required by our excellent and supportive publisher.
Practically, as the project took shape, we realized how much of it involved referencing and codifying other people’s ideas and methods. We tried always to give credit where it was due, but we also never wanted to suggest that any one person (certainly not us) owns any of the concepts or methods we included. Creative Commons licensing was one way to signal all of that.
World Social Forum Workshop, by Dave Mitchell.
“Artist-activists” are at the heart of Beautiful Trouble’s work. How do you define “artist activists?” How does someone join your network?
“Artist-activist” is such an awkward, artless term — we really struggled to come up with something better… artivist? pranktivist? bohemshevik? Nothing quite fit, but what we wanted to signal was the marriage of two distinct worlds: the elegance, eye for detail, and outside-the-box creativity of the art world with the time-bound, eyes-on-the-prize, immediate-results focus of the organizer. That sweet spot is where minds and hearts open and revolutions take flight, and it’s something anyone can (and should!) seek to embody in their work. Folks who want to pitch us an idea can drop us a line at getintouch@beautifultrouble.org.
How do you define “the commons?”
The commons represents our best hope for a liveable future. It’s an important enough concept to us that we included it as one of the ‘theories’ in the book, in a piece written by Peter Barnes. In that piece, he proposes that by building a system that protects and expands our common wealth rather than one that exploits it, we can address both our ecological and social imbalances.
What kinds of stories can you tell about your work and how you support global social movements? What kinds of wins are you celebrating? What has your work looked like since November? Has it changed?
For the past few years we’ve been busy working with ActionAid and activists from across the Global South to document the tools and tactics of creative activists operating under authoritarian regimes. That project is available online at beautifulrising.org, and will be published this year as Beautiful Rising: Creative Resistance from the Global South (OR Books).
After last November’s presidential election, that focus on authoritarian regimes is sadly much more relevant and timely for activists in the United States. Specifically in response to the Trump moment, we’ve started a “Trouble vs. Trump” series to update our toolbox for the current moment. We’ve been hard at work expanding our training program to meet the explosion of interest in nonviolent direct action training, and we’ve just launched a resistance hotline to help support the surge of new progressive activists planning their first actions and campaigns.
Creative Action Training in NYC, by Dave Mitchell
You have a number of projects in addition to Beautiful Trouble including Beautiful Rising, Climate Action Labs, and Beautiful Solutions as well as your in-person trainings for activists. How do you balance this work?
Much like the book we produced, we’re basically a modular organization — a motley crew of activists, trainers and editors scattered around the globe who are organizing horizontally together to spin out related projects that align with our goal of making social movements more creative and effective. That loose structure means we’re able to respond fairly quickly to new opportunities, but also that we sometimes struggle to keep everything running smoothly, since we’ve got no central office, no dedicated development director, and a dispersed leadership structure. Somehow we’ve managed to produce a lot of great tools and keep all the plates spinning so far. Folks who want to support this juggling act are welcome to kick in a few bucks on our Patreon page, and get a copy of our next book as a token of our thanks.
As a bunch of communicators, what do you think messaging is going to look like on the left in the upcoming months and years? What should it look like?
There’s a battle raging right now for the future of the electoral left. It has taken different forms in different countries, but at its core, that struggle is over whether or not the traditional left/liberal parties can be repurposed to present a compelling, broad-based, radical alternative that speaks to people’s 21st-century fears and frustrations, hopes and dreams, or whether these parties will continue to play the role of neoliberalism’s good cop. The outcome of that battle will basically determine whether or not we can bring the fight for a better future from the margins to the mainstream.
Another way to say it: the left needs to get much better at speaking to people’s values hopes, and desires for a better future, and then put that messaging to work in service of a shared political project.
RightsCon is an annual conference that focuses on awareness-raising, organising, and advocacy on global issues at the intersection of technology and human rights. The event is produced by the international nonprofit organization AccessNow. RightsCon participants include members of digital rights organisations, legal experts, civil society, government, and business representatives.
Creative Commons, Mozilla, and the Wikimedia Foundation organized a panel discussion on the work being done to reform the European Union copyright rules. The goal of the session was to share information on key topics in the Commission’s proposal related to copyright and digital rights as well as connect people with educational and advocacy efforts that support a progressive reform in the public interest.
MEP Julia Reda set the stage for the panel, providing background about both the underlying principles for modernising the copyright rules, and also the process that’s involved and where we are now. Ms. Reda is a member of the European Pirate Party and VP for the Greens/European Free Alliance group, She was the rapporteur for the comprehensive copyright evaluation report presented to the Parliament in 2015.
We then moved on to explore six key issues of the copyright reform proposal. Lisette Kalshoven from Kennisland and the Communia Association explored the opportunities and challenges presented by the new copyright exception for education. Lisette talked about how the existing copyright exception for educational uses laid out in the 2001 Information Society Directive is quite good, but is not harmonized across all Member States and doesn’t cover online uses of educational content. The new education exception introduced in the Commission’s proposal is positive because it is mandatory. However, there are three main challenges. First, there is a feature whereby if there is a licensing option in a particular Member State, then that country could ignore the implementation of the education exception. Second, the exception would only cover more traditional educational establishments, such as schools, leaving out other informal education practices, such as online courses. Finally, there’s still some confusion about whether the new exception would adequately cover both online and offline uses of educational resources. Lisette also mentioned the recently-launched digital campaign https://rightcopyright.eu/, which aims to mobilize the public in supporting positive changes to copyright that will improve access and use of educational materials and technologies for teachers and students of all types.
Raegan MacDonald from Mozilla discussed the possibility for including a copyright exception for user-generated content. Raegan talked about how the idea of introducing this type of copyright exception would go a long way in creating a better balance in the reform, since the current provisions seem to address the (sometimes unwarranted) concerns of the traditional rights holders like publishers rather than new creators and users. While it was not included in the Commission’s original proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, an exception for user-generated content (UGC) has been introduced in the draft opinions of both the Culture and Education Committee and the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection. The key point on introducing a UGC exception is to support new digital creativity, free speech, and cultural expression.
Paul Ayris from University College London Library talked about the proposed exception to enable text and data mining. Paul said that current research predicts a 1.9% growth of European GDP if the EU commits to a broad exception for text and data mining. Researchers (or anyone else) should not be forced to acquire additional licenses to conduct text and data mining on content which they already have lawful access, and he argued that the EU should follow the lead of the recommendation laid down in the Hague Declaration that “the right to read is the right to mine.” The exception should also cover users and uses outside of the traditional academic research community, as doing so would promote novel innovation across and between the public and private sectors.
Marta Peirano from eldiario.es talked about the controversial ancillary right for press publishers. Marta explained the negative repercussion to news producers of Spain when they implemented an ancillary copyright a few years ago. This is because Google News, which would have been forced to pay fees to link to and provide context to publishers’ content, called the bluff of rightsholders by discontinuing their service. When users weren’t able to discover information through content aggregation services, access to news sites dropped precipitously. She explained that the publishers pushed for a similar ancillary right in Germany, with comparable results. With so much harm to readers and no return to rights holders, the only sane option is to remove the Commission’s ancillary right for press publishers through Parliament amendments.
Agata Nowacka from Seznam talked about the Commission’s proposal that would require filtering of user-uploaded content. Seznam is a search engine based in the Czech Republic that enjoys a high market penetration there—it is one of the few places in Europe where Google does not fully dominate the search market. Agata said that as a relatively small operation (~1000 employees) Seznam would be hard pressed to pull the resources required to implement an active monitoring mechanism proposed by the Commission’s draft directive. This type of “active censorship” would be negative for most of their users, and might only work to reinforce the ubiquity of the major players, thus reducing competition in the search business.
Finally, Dimi Dimitrov from Wikimedia’s Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EUdiscussed policy options for safeguarding the public domain. While there are some positive provisions in the Commission’s proposal to strengthen cultural heritage institutions, there are several ongoing disputes between museums and the Wikipedia community. Dimi pointed to a case in which a German museum claimed copyright on the digital reproduction of a portrait of composer Richard Wagner. The work was painted in 1862, so it clearly is in the public domain, which would make it a natural addition to the Wikipedia page about Wagner. However, the museum claims a new copyright that arises when the work was digitized, thus for all practical purposes keeping the work out of the public domain. Dimi said that these types of disputes are not uncommon, and that a forward-looking EU copyright law should aim to clarify that digital reproductions of public domain artworks should also be in the public domain—for the broad benefit and enjoyment of the public.
We’ll continue to advocate for a progressive reform in the public interest. Right now amendments are being tabled by the relevant committees, which will eventually be negotiated and voted on in the European Parliament and Council. There’s still time to fix this copyright law to make sure that it supports users and creators in the 21st century.
Last week COMMUNIA launched the rightcopyright.eu campaign in order to support a better copyright for education. Let’s raise our voices and spread the word about this petition so we can influence European legislators in creating a better copyright for education.
The European Commission has presented a new European copyright law (Draft Directive) to the European Parliament that deeply impacts education in a disappointing and non-facilitative manner. Educators have embraced modern possibilities, and so should copyright. Therefore, COMMUNIA has developed a campaign website to collect signatures of educators throughout Europe to let the European Parliamentarians know we need a better copyright for education.
The European parliament will vote on the proposal later this year and can change, accept or reject it. COMMUNIA will present the outcomes of the petition in the European Parliament, clearly showing them the voice of citizens eager for a good-quality education, and a copyright that matches.
Copyright impacts education – it determines the extent to which a teacher may use, share or remix any material made by someone else. In some cases, there is a special exception to copyright for education, but teachers are often forced to do things that are not allowed. All European countries have implemented the current EU laws on copyright in a different way, which makes it very difficult for teachers to know what they can and cannot share internationally.
What you can do
Please visit the campaign website rightcopyright.eu and sign the petition for a better copyright for education. Please share the campaign with your colleagues, friends and family via mail, social media or face to face as well. You can find sample tweets, posts and images on the campaign website.
If you would like to know more about the campaign, or have questions, please contact Lisette Kalshoven at lk@kl.nl.
