Glasstree is a new platform built on “healing academic publishing” to provide a range of Open Access options that allow academics to quickly and inexpensively self-publish their monographs, returning 70% of the royalties to the author. The company was launched in November by a number of publishing veterans with the goal of directly addressing the needs of academics. Glasstree offers Creative Commons licensing options to authors in order to facilitate the wider dissemination of knowledge via Gold Open Access. In the words of SVP Daniel Berze, “[Glasstree] is designed to put academics firmly back in the driving seat when it comes to ownership of their work. [T]he model empowers academics to share their knowledge and make their work more accessible to their respective communities.”
The site was built by Lulu.com, the pioneering self-publishing company that has been a longtime user of CC licensing. Drawing from the great strides being made by the open access community, Glasstree’s embrace of CC licensing is exciting and innovative. They are running a free trial period through Spring 2017 for authors to try out the service, so be sure to sign up soon and give it a try.
If you’ve ever attended a demonstration in North America, chances are you’ve seen the work of the 30 person artist collective Justseeds, a group of printmakers who have made an indelible impact on activism and art through their free, distributed graphics. The nearly twenty-year-old collective of printmakers work as agitators, educators, and artists to support grassroots struggles for peace and justice with an evocative style and large online catalog of free images that has helped them spread their message and aesthetic far past the streets and homes of activists around the world.
As a collective committed to social justice, they allow their members to work autonomously and from a diversity of perspectives and political positions – their vision that another world is possible depends upon it. In this interview with Creative Commons, cooperative co-founders Roger Peet and Josh MacPhee discuss solidarity, licensing, and their unique responsibility toward artists. All images in this piece are CC0.
With 30 members working in a variety of countries and languages, how do you deal with representation and diversity within your communities? How do you deal with various interests and engagement in your political work?
Resist, Jesus Barraza
Roger: Something that has defined Justseeds from its earliest stages as a cooperative has been the breadth of perspectives and political positions within the group. We all agree on a lot of things, but certainly not everything, and I think that we’ve thrived by maintaining a space for a variety of visions. We trust each other to represent our individual views responsibly. We rely on our members to articulate their own ideas and their particular passions, and those are more or less subsumed into the broader public presentation of Justseeds. In that way we’re a complex political object- we don’t spend a lot of time articulating group positions, and we rely to a certain degree on our audience’s interpretation of the work that we create to produce our public persona. There is no central program that we adhere to, but we rely on that aforementioned trust to maintain the political pole around which the cooperative turns. The only case in which we vet work as a group is when we’re distributing art by people who aren’t members of the cooperative.
We are Irreplaceable, Jordan Alam and Jess x Snow
Josh: Autonomy is one of the key organizational principles of Justseeds. Some of it is built into our model, but much of it is a default function of being so geographically spread out, and increasingly coming from different experiences and communities. We have have little centralized and coordinated representation of “Justseeds.” Our most visible collective presence is our website, which has an extremely neutral design, allowing the content to drive the experience of the viewer/user, and the content is entirely created by individual coop members, from the items they sell to their blog posts to their downloadable graphics. Collective projects also have a place on the site, but they tend to be polyphonic, and are rarely represented with a single artists image or work.
Each member is afforded the trust to work, create, and organize in their communities as they see fit. The hope and goal is that we all will benefit from each others work. The more we each invest in the issues that are important to us, the better off we all are, and the more collective knowledge to draw from for our own goal work.
What is the role of the political artist in 2017?
Roger: To fight, bluntly. To maintain and broaden the fight for a different society and for a different relationship with the world outside of human priorities. To contribute to the destruction of Capitalism and white supremacy in whatever manner possible. Most importantly, however, the role of the political artist is to persist. Many of the members of Justseeds have been making political art in a variety of contexts for more than twenty years, and although the contemporary situation is more fraught on a daily basis, it’s not new.
We have been working to support political, social and environmental struggles and confronting the bitter brute heart of this society for decades, and we will continue to do so- constantly in pursuit of new methods and new alliances by which to achieve a new world.
Josh: I’m not sure it’s a new role, but it seems much more clearly now to be the creation of culture which furthers and amplifies the work that communities and groups are doing on the ground in protests, actions, organizing, and campaigning. Our art and projects role out in the street, in community spaces, within the media, across social media, and in our private spaces. All are important venues for pushing forward messages and ideas.
We Won’t Go Back, Roger Peet
In addition, artists have the privilege to raise questions and make challenging images which might not be at the top of the agenda for a very goals-oriented campaign or organization. We need instrumentalized protest culture, but we also need work that challenges norms, makes audiences inquisitive, and threatens the status quo in its own right.
How do you deal with varying approaches to copyright within the organization? For example, much of Nicolas Lampert’s work is Creative Commons, but many other artists don’t adopt the CC label, even though their work is free to reproduce and share? What kinds of tools do you use to support artists who want to work within your collective and their differing approaches to collective work and action?
Roger: I think the reason that most people in Justseeds don’t apply a Creative Commons assignation to their work is that they’re unfamiliar with how it works, or that we as a group have a rather blasé attitude to how our work might populate the public domain. Personally I feel that a lot of the work that I make available on our free graphics page is geared towards a specific audience, and that I more or less trust that audience to use it as they and I might see fit. I realize that’s a pretty naïve attitude but I haven’t had any experiences that have pushed me away from that position. Yet. It would probably behoove us to develop an institutional policy whereby we assign all graphics with a Creative Commons license- maybe we’ll get around to that after this interview.
Josh: I honestly don’t think most of us have put a lot of thought into it. I know that when Favianna Rodriguez and I put out Reproduce and Revolt, a book of political graphics intended to be used by activists and organizers, we put the entire book under Creative Commons license. But for my own work, I never even think about it—instead I just almost always give permission when ever anyone asks. It’s not because I even have any criticism of CC, I’m just generally not that concerned about who uses my work.
Sanctuary Cities Now, Pete Railand
How are you working toward a culture of the commons, where artists and communities can share resources together? How does your work promote giving and gratitude?
Roger: Trying to make a living as an artist is a challenging prospect, and perhaps especially challenging as a political artist. There is a lot of pressure on artists to make their political work available for free, or to do new work in support of causes without expectation of remuneration. It can be a difficult line to walk, but I think that Justseeds artists have, in general, a pretty responsive and responsible attitude towards what they are and aren’t willing to do for free. Basically that could boil down to “If nobody’s making any money, then I will gladly contribute my work for free. If people are getting paid, however, then I the artist also need to be paid.” As political artists, all of the members of Justseeds make a lot of free work for movements and causes because we feel that we are a part of those movements, or that we feel compelled to offer our art to them as a gesture of solidarity or support. Much of our work is about ideas, and we want those ideas to spread- so a lot of our work is always going to be available for free.
Something that I like to do with my work is to create an edition of prints featuring an image that I offer for sale on the Justseeds site- and then also create a high-res downloadable graphic version of that image that I put on our free graphics page. What I hope happens in that situation is that people wanting to use my image for political work will download it and do what they need to with it, and that those who want a nice, handmade version of it for their workspace or as a gift will purchase the print.
Josh: I really wanted to build into our new website a solid, functional, searchable, and expandable free graphics page, because in my experience so many artists and organizers want to create downloadable graphics, and set up individual silo-ed sites for their projects—whether its a set of anti-war posters, or images related to the environment, or graphics about reproductive justice—and they promote the site for a week or a month or a year, and then the site slowly descends into the swamp of the internet, never to be visited again. One of the real benefits of Justseeds is that we already have a consistent flow of traffic of the very kinds of people that are looking for graphics to download, so we are a perfect aggregator. People have raised questions about how it might be perceived that we are using the free graphics as “bait” to bring people to the site to buy things, but I actually think it functions the other way around. People come to buy things, and then see how much cool stuff they can just download for free. Hopefully in the long run people will do enough of both to allow us to keep going, and to keep building a broader and deeper collection of free images.
What does open access look like for the law? Through free access to primary legal sources, the Free Law Project provides an important service to advocates, journalists, researchers, and the public. Joining with an international movement for Free Access to Law, the US-based organization helps people know their rights in an increasingly uncertain and rapidly changing legal era.
The Free Law Project is an umbrella organization for a variety of projects, including Court Listener for millions of pieces of legal data, the RECAP project (begun by Aaron Swartz in 2009) to freely open the PACER archive of legal data, a complete repository of Supreme Court Data, a repository of judicial opinions and seals, and a Free Law Reporters Database. The project’s call for greater transparency in the law has been covered in a variety of news outlets, and their work continues to grow in scope and importance.
The Free Law Project is accepting volunteers, legal and otherwise, for help with code, transcription, and more at their website. Project founder Mike Lissner graciously answered these questions via email.
Why is it important for citizens to gain access to free legal documents? How does your work run parallel with the open access movement in science and academia?
We see our work and the open access movement as two sides of the same coin. Just as people need access to journal articles to do good scientific research, they need access to legal information to do good legal research. It’s not enough to have access to American laws in the same way that it’s not enough to have access to the laws of physics. Knowing what the laws say is one thing, but properly understanding them in practice is something else entirely. That’s a gap we are working to fill.
With every passing year, we are seeing more and more people defending themselves in court, without hiring a lawyer. Last year, in federal courts alone, 52% of filings were made by people defending themselves, a whopping 18% increase from 2015.
To get a fair shake, these people need good tools and they need to be well informed. We believe the way to accomplish that is by providing high-quality legal data to organizations, researchers, journalists, and the public.
How has the internet changed free access to law? How has it made it more or less possible to gain access to free legal documents? How is your work technically mediated, and how do you create tools to empower legal recourse?
We collect hundreds of new legal documents from court websites every day and make them searchable on CourtListener.com. Within minutes of a new case being published, we can send you an email about it so that you know that it’s something you may want to read. Prior to the Internet, this kind of access was impossible.
But there are still major difficulties that we encounter while gathering these documents. For example, most opinions published by the courts don’t have unique identifiers, so there’s no easy way to cite them until they are blessed by a third party publisher. And of course, very few courts have websites with high-quality machine-readable data, so we spend a lot of effort making sure our crawlers are working properly.
One of our biggest projects, RECAP, collects data from a government-run website called PACER, where legal documents cost roughly ten cents per page. PACER is the biggest paywall in the world, holding more than a billion copyright-free documents, and we’re working on liberating as many of them as we can so that the public can easily and freely access them.
You run a variety of projects, technical and nontechnical, to help citizens gain greater access to legal documents. How does your work contribute to a more just and open society?
We approach this from two different angles. First, we try to make the legal industry more competitive by offering high-quality legal data and APIs. This lowers the barrier to entry that startups and researchers face, making it easier for them to focus on their innovations or research instead of on how to get expensive legal data.
Second, part of our mission is to create simple high-quality tools for people to use to research the law. This helps level the playing field by giving both sides of any legal dispute good tools. Some legal tools are incredibly sophisticated, but even the simplest tools are often quite expensive (it’s hard to know how expensive because prices are usually secret).
We see one of our roles as pushing the bar of what can be free. If Free Law Project, a tiny non-profit, can offer a tool for free, surely your organization can too.
How can non-lawyers get involved with your projects? How do you see your work as being more broadly related to legal advocacy? What kinds of contributions do you seek from the public?
This is a great question. We’re always seeking help from just about any- and everybody. All of our work is open source, and we’re always looking for people to help build new features or squash bugs. We have data entry work that we need volunteer corps to help fix, and we even have a collection of photos of judges that needs to be fleshed out. Essentially, if you have time and skills to volunteer, we can probably use your help.
You work mostly in the United States, but the Free Access to Law Movement is a global movement. How does your project advocate globally as well as in the US? What kinds of organizations are doing similar work around the world?
The Free Access to Law Movement is incredibly important and has gained a toehold in dozens of countries. You can see a list of all the members on their website, www.falm.info. A great way to get involved in the Free Access to Law Movement is to start at that site, find an organization in your country, and send them an email. There’s also the Law via the Internet conference every year that attracts free law advocates from around the world. For our part, working on the American legal system has proven to be more than enough!
Today we’re announcing our last two keynotes and accepted sessions and speakers for this year’s CC Global Summit in Toronto, just two months away.
In addition to Ruth Okediji and Sarah Jeong, we are thrilled to welcome Ana Garzón Sabogal and Ashe Dryden, both consummate representatives of their fields. Our diverse set of keynotes were selected by community members due to their incredible contributions to open culture, diversity, and community building. These four women from Africa, Latin America, and North America are representative of our community’s commitment to fostering a diverse, collaborative commons fueled by gratitude.
Ana Garzón Sabogal works with collaborative learning, cultural management, activism and free culture. Based in Colombia, she has organised diverse projects including Radio Vallena, a collective radio station that traveled Colombia’s Pacific Coast to Panama City, sharing stories about migration and resistance and Territories. She is currently Director of the cultural foundation Más Arte Más Acción, part of Arts Collaboratory. Ana will be speaking about culture, open tools, and collaboration in open communities.
Ashe Dryden is a former White House fellow, programmer, diversity advocate and consultant, prolific writer, speaker, and creator of AlterConf and Fund Club. She’s one of the foremost experts on diversity in the tech industry. She’s currently writing two books: The Diverse Team and The Inclusive Event. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Scientific American, Wired, NPR, and more. Ashe will be speaking on the topic of open, diverse, and inclusive communities.
In addition, we are excited to announce our list of accepted speakers and sessions, which is made up of an incredible group of experts, advocates, and enthusiasts from all over the globe. All sessions are tagged across five tracks at the summit website and are subject to change, with final program schedule TBD. Thanks to everyone who answered our Call for Submissions!
Web services company Cloudflare revealed late yesterday that it had experienced a large-scale memory leak. About two million websites use Cloudflare for services like content delivery and Internet security. Creative Commons uses Cloudflare, and we investigated this issue as soon as it was reported.
We have not found any cause for concern—as far as we know, CCID login data was not exposed. And because our donor data did not touch the Cloudflare service, we do not believe it was ever at risk. Additionally, Cloudflare has contacted us directly and informed us that we are not among the sites they know of that were affected by the leak.
Despite this, out of an abundance of caution, we are requiring all CCID users to reset their passwords. We are sending emails to CCID users asking them to do this immediately by going to login.creativecommons.org.
If there are any changes, we will be in touch to let you know. For more information about the Cloudflare memory leak, read the company’s incident report.
Ana Garzón Sabogal works with collaborative learning, cultural management, activism and free culture. Based in Colombia, she has organised diverse projects including 
Ashe Dryden is a former White House fellow, programmer, diversity advocate and consultant, prolific writer,