I’m proud to share with you Creative Commons’ 2015 State of the Commons report, our best effort to measure the immeasurable scope of the commons by looking at the CC licensed content, along with content marked as public domain, that comprise the slice of the commons powered by CC tools.

Creative Commoners have known all along that collaboration, sharing, and cooperation are a driving force for human evolution. And so for many it will come as no surprise that in 2015 we achieved a tremendous milestone: over 1.1 billion CC licensed photos, videos, audio tracks, educational materials, research articles, and more have now been contributed to the shared global commons.

Our small team continues to work to grow and improve the commons for everyone. We’re proud of our accomplishments, but there’s more to do and we need your help. Our goal is to raise $30,000 over the next week to celebrate the release and accomplishments of our 2015 State of the Commons report. Will you make a contribution of $10, $25, $50 or more today?

As we grow the size and scope of the commons, we are working hard to ensure that it becomes a vibrant, usable commons — full of collaboration and gratitude. We need our contributors to be able to talk to each other, find new content, give feedback, offer their thanks and encouragement, get analytics, and build networks and communities around the content they are creating. We want to light up the commons, and we need you to join us.

CC is a global charity that relies on our generous community of supporters like you. Kick off our year-end campaign strong by helping us meet our first benchmark: $30,000 over the next week to celebrate the release and accomplishments of our 2015 State of the Commons report.

Make your contribution to Creative Commons today.

Thank you for being a part of this.

With thanks,

Ryan Merkley
CEO, Creative Commons
@ryanmerkley

Read the full report: stateof.creativecommons.org/2015.
Read the press release.

In October we wrote that the U.S. Department of Education (ED) is considering an open licensing requirement for direct competitive grant programs. If adopted, educational resources created with ED grant funds will be openly licensed for the public to freely use, share, and build upon.

The Department of Education has been running a comment period in which interested parties can provide feedback on the proposed policy. Creative Commons has drafted a response, which discusses the open licensing policy and other questions proposed by ED. You too can share your thoughts with ED–here’s a guide about how to do it. The deadline is December 18.

We think the adoption of an open licensing requirement is useful because it clarifies the rights of the public in how we may all access, use, and adapt ED-funded resources.

The license must be worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable, and must grant the public permission to access, reproduce, publicly perform, publicly display, adapt, distribute, and otherwise use, for any purposes, copyrightable intellectual property created with direct competitive grant funds, provided that the licensee gives attribution to the designated authors of the intellectual property.

We think ED should include a specific mention that the open license definition they provide most closely aligns with the permissions and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 license (CC BY). This way, it will be clear to grantees which open license ED requires them to use.

It’s good to see the Department of Education proposing a similar rule that the Department of Labor introduced several years ago with their community college and career training grant program. That $2 billion grant pool required that educational resources created with Department of Labor grant funds be licensed under the CC BY license. By doing so, the Department of Labor made sure that the resources created with its grant funds can be easily discovered and legally reused and revised by the public.

Creative Commons draft response to Department of Education open licensing policy

How to submit a comment

cape point (panorama) by André van Rooyen, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In September we announced that Creative Commons and the Open Policy Network are hosting a second Institute for Open Leadership. We’ve seen a significant increase in the number and diversity of policies that require that publicly funded resources should be widely shared under liberal open licenses so that the public can access and reuse the materials. These resources range from scientific research to digital textbooks to workforce training curricula, and more. Philanthropic foundations have been stepping up too–requiring their grant-funded works to be made freely available under Creative Commons licenses. We want to see more of these open licensing policies flourish, which will feed the commons, promote cross-discipline collaboration, and even increase the transparency of government and philanthropic investments.

The Institute brings together mentors who work with the fellows to develop a open licensing policy for their government, university, or project. We received many applications, and our review committee has invited the following group to join us in Cape Town in March 2016.

• Jane-Frances Agbu – National Open University of Nigeria – Lagos, Nigeria
• Rim Azib – British Council, Tunis – Bizerta, Tunisia
• Steve Cairns – Greenpeace International – Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Amanda Coolidge – BCcampus – Vancouver, BC, Canada
• Daniel DeMarte – Tidewater Community College – Norfolk, VA, United States
• Paula Eskett – CORE Education – Christchurch, New Zealand
• Mostafa Azad Kamal – Bangladesh Open University – Gazipur, Bangladesh
• Roshan Kumar Karn – Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital – Kathmandu, Nepal
• Vincent Kizza – Open Learning Exchange Uganda – Kampala, Uganda
• Fiona MacAllister – University of the Witwatersrand – Johannesburg, South Africa
• Katja Mayer – University of Vienna – Vienna, Austria
• Caroline Mbogo – The World Agroforestry Centre – Nairobi, Kenya
• Niall McNulty – Cambridge University Press – Cape Town, South Africa
• Juliana Monteiro – Museu da Imigração do Estado de São Paulo – São Paulo, Brazil
• Jacques Murinda – Great Lakes School of Open – Kigali, Rwanda
• Alessandro Sarretta – Institute of Marine Sciences – Venezia, Italy

None of this would be possible without the assistance of the Open Policy Network and ongoing support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Open Society Foundations. Thank you.

 

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published its latest Open Educational Resources (OER) report yesterday: Open Educational Resources: A Catalyst for Innovation, Educational Research and Innovation. (PDF)

The report covers the following topics:

1. OER in educational policy and practice
2. OER as a catalyst for innovation
3. Fostering new forms of learning for the 21st century
4. Fostering teachers’ professional development
5. Containing educational costs
6. Improving the quality of educational resources
7. Widening the distribution of high quality educational resources
8. Reducing barriers to learning opportunities
9. Research on OER and the challenge of the extended lifecycle
10. Securing the sustainability of OER initiatives
11. Public policy interventions to improve teaching and learning through OER

Authors Dominic Orr, Michele Rimini and Dirk Van Damme describe the report as:

[following on] earlier work by CERI on OER, which resulted in the publication Giving Knowledge for Free in 2007, and an OECD country questionnaire on OER-related policy and activities in 2012. It seeks to provide a state of the art review of evidence on OER practice and impacts, and evaluate the remaining challenges for OER entering the mainstream of educational practice.

Creative Commons is also pleased to see OECD using a CC license on its report. We look forward to seeing more OECD reports openly licensed in the near future.

This report is a welcome contribution to overall OER strategy and open licensing policy recommendations to governments; and will be helpful in educating national governments, policy markers and educators about the benefits of OER specifically and open education more generally.

See also: OECD’s blog post.

The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) is a UK-based charity that “seeks to transform the lives of poor and vulnerable children in developing countries.” Yesterday the foundation announced its first Transparency Policy, which requires its grantees and consultants to widely disseminate resources they create under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).

We aim to make as much content as possible freely available through open licensing, such as a Creative Commons license. This includes development work, research and data funded by CIFF. For instance, CIFF-funded peer-reviewed research articles which would have gone behind a publication’s pay-wall will now be freely available.

In addition to requiring open licensing for grant-funded materials like presentations and reports, CIFF has taken a progressive approach to data sharing.

CIFF believes that providing access to research plans and research data permits healthy scrutiny of evidence, reduces duplication of effort, and enables secondary uses of data, which improves efficiency of resourcing.

The foundation “expects that all data created using grant funds should be released into the public domain” using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication.

Like other foundations, CIFF realizes that there may be cases where exceptions to the default open license may be warranted.

The organization has also developed an implementation guide to help staff and grantees understand the open policy requirements. This guide is licensed under CC BY, and was a remix based on the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Licensing Toolkit for Staff (also licensed under CC BY).

Creative Commons is happy to have been able to work with CIFF as they developed their open licensing policy over the last year. Congratulations to the foundation for this important policy adoption! It’s fantastic to see philanthropic organizations from around the world working together to populate the commons and increase the global impact of their charitable giving.