Back in November, we launched the CC Toolkits project with the aim of invigorating the CC Community through affiliate events. CC Argentina collaborated with Wikimedia Argentina to hack out a template for the toolkits during a sprint, creating a starting point for just about anyone to collect open content about CC, and publish it on the web.

CC Toolkits Hackathon / by Gino Cingolani / CC BY-NC-SA

Building momentum for sharing resources about CC

This month, affiliate groups in Argentina, Paraguay, Nigeria, and Poland will be running local events bringing people together around openness in law, government, education, and cultural works. Though the events will be about much more than open copyright licenses, volunteers in our community will be sprinting and hacking to gathering and create useful videos, guides, and other content on the web that make it easy for others to learn about the importance of CC.

CC Toolkits Homepage

The toolkit template developed by the design team is composed of a WordPress theme built from the ground up, with media panes for embedding and linking and viewing content about CC that various affiliate groups have created. The goal is make it easier for creators and curators in the CC community to frame interesting and useful content into toolkits that can support conversations about CC. But beyond the tech, the regional events happening this month will help set the stage for new ways we can share about open.

Here is a rundown of events being run by affiliates this month:

CC Nigeria will be hosting an event at the University of Lagos to talk about CC, address offline and low-bandwidth components of toolkit bundles, and translate the current version of the Basics of CC toolkit into local languages.
 

CC Argentina will be running a multi-day event in Capital Federal (Buenos Aires), Resistencia (Chaco), and Cordoba, focusing CC and it’s importance in education. Two days of hackathons will take place in late February, bringing together members of CC and other open organizations to discuss how CC licenses can improve education.
 

CC Paraguay will be hosting a 2 day “CCthon” in late February to produce toolkit materials to support CC in government. The group has invited participation from the Open Government of Paraguay to guide the toolkit, and is coordinating the event with local translators and bloggers.
 

CC Poland will be focusing on the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, museums), holding a meeting between among CC community members, Wikimedians and other open culture supporters. The two-day summit will take place February 20-21 in Krakow, Poland, crafting a toolkit about CC licence use for cultural heritage institutions.
 

To keep up with the working groups, check out the About page on cctoolkits.com, and the hashtag #cctoolkits on social media channels, and uploading photos to flickr with the same tag. If you’re interested in seeing how the pieces of the toolkits are being threaded together, the Collaborate page has more information about creating toolkits with our design files and media.

OCW Consortium / CC BY

Creative Commons invites you to participate in the 3rd annual Open Education Week! Taking place from 10-15 March, 2014, the purpose of Open Education Week is raise the profile of open educational resources (OER) and the global movement of people and organizations behind them, in addition to highlighting the crucial role that legal tools, such as Creative Commons licenses, play in making OER possible.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium, organizer of Open Ed Week, cites several case studies demonstrating the growing impact of OER, including:

• A pilot program in Utah’s K-12 schools that used printed open textbooks, cutting textbook costs by over 50%
• A Haitian solar energy company that built their business to serve the needs of its local community thanks to open courseware that helped to deepen its knowledge about solar engineering
• An engineer in India that developed his management skills and international perspectives to advance his career thanks to a self-designed study plan consisting of OER

…not to mention CC’s own set of Team Open and OER case studies!

You can contribute to the week by submitting an informational video about OER or a specific OER project; hosting a local event/workshop or webinar, and promoting the week to your networks. The deadline to submit your resource or event is 28 February, 2014.

• Submit your proposal
• Promote the week by hosting a banner on your website

We look forward to seeing your contributions in March!

ANK repeat consensus sequence across all domains of life

started with that bold challenge. Now, the scrappy startup that dared has done it. One year old today, PeerJ, the peer-reviewed journal, has seen startling growth having published 232 articles under CC-BY 3.0 last year. By the way, per Scimago that number is more than what 90% of any other journal publishes in a year. Then in April 2013 PeerJ started publishing PeerJ PrePrints, the non-peer-reviewed preprint server with 186 PrePrints in 2013, all under CC BY 3.0.

Now PeerJ has more than 800 Academic Editors, from a wide variety of countries and institutions. There are also five Nobel Prize winners on the PeerJ Board. PeerJ receives submissions from all over the world, and covers all of the biological, health, medical sciences. As of the time of this post’s publication, the top subject areas for PeerJ submissions were

Not everything has been easy. Starting an entire publishing company from scratch has been a learning experience for the entire team. From no brand recognition, no history, no infrastructure etc. to having successfully established themselves in all the places that a publishing company should be in: archiving solutions; DOI issuing services; indexing services; membership of professional bodies; ISSN registrations etc. PeerJ has done very well. Last year PeerJ won the ALPSP Award for Publishing Innovation.

PeerJ’s vision/mission are deceptively simple:

• Keep Innovating
• Remember Whom We Serve
• Pass on the Savings

PeerJ decision-making process is fast, very fast. Authors get their first decision back in a median of 24 days. Being small, and non-traditional means they can take risks. They have built interesting functionality and models such as optional open peer review; Their business model is based on individuals purchasing low cost lifetime publication plans, and that has resulted in a lot of their functionality being very individual-centric.

Compared to traditional publishers, PeerJ is a very tech-focused company. They built all the technology themselves, quite unusual in the academic publishing world, which normally uses third parties for their peer-review software and publication platforms. By doing it themselves they have much more control over their destiny, cost, and can build functionality which suits their unique needs. The high percentage of authors describing their experience with PeerJ as their best publishing experience is arguably a direct result of this. Much of PeerJ’s software is open source, and their techie roots are evident in their engagement with the community via events such as Hack4ac, a hackday to specifically celebrate, ahem, CC BY!

Peter Binfield, Co-Founder, says:

We firmly believe that Open Access publishing is the future of the academic journal publishing system. With the current trends we see in the marketplace (including governmental legislation; institutional mandates; the rapid growth of the major OA publishers; and the increasing education and desire from authors) we believe that Open Access content will easily make up >50% of newly published content in the next 4 or 5 years.

 
Once all academic content is OA and under an appropriate re-use license we believe that significant new opportunities will emerge for people to use this content; to build on it for new discoveries and products; and to accelerate the scientific discovery process.

Binfield continues:

We regard the CC-BY license as the gold standard for OA Publications. Some other publishers provide authors with “NC” options, or try to write their own OA licenses, but we have a firm belief in the CC BY flavor. If there are many different OA licenses in play then it becomes increasingly difficult for users to determine what rights they have for any given piece of work, and so it is cleaner and simpler if everyone agrees on a single (preferably liberal) license. We were pleased to see the license updated to 4.0 and were quick to adopt it.

In Jan 2014, PeerJ moved to CC BY 4.0 for all articles newly submitted from that point onwards (prior articles remain under CC BY 3.0 of course). Today, on PeerJ’s first birthday, we at CC send PeerJ our best wishes, and look forward to ever more courageous, even outrageous innovations from this precocious one year old.

Creative Commons would like to invite you to a breakfast discussion “Really Open Education. Domestic Policies for Open Educational Resources”. The event will take place on the 18th of February 2014 and be hosted in the European Parliament by Róża Gräfin von Thun und Hohenstein, MEP.

The event will highlight open education initiatives currently implemented in European member states, with a particular focus on primary and secondary education. With the event, we would like to draw the attention to the development and use Open Educational Resources as a key aspect of the new “Opening Up Education” initiative.

Invited panelists will present projects that deal with open e-textbooks and supplemental resources, repositories for open resources created by teachers, and policies developed in support of open education initiatives. We aim these examples to support the development of open education in Europe within the scope of current educational initiatives and programs, such as Erasmus+.

Program of the event

Welcoming remarks:
Róża Gräfin von Thun und Hohenstein, MEP

Presentations of country-level activities and key issues related to Open Educational Resources:

• Hans de Four (KlasCement, Belgium): the role of KlasCement, an open educational resources repository, in Belgian education;
• Teresa Nobre (Creative Commons Portugal): legal aspects of Open Education, in the perspective of EU copyright reform;
• Robert Schuwer (UNESCO Chair on OER, Open Universiteit, Netherlands): development of Open Education in the Netherlands;
• Krzysztof Wojewodzic (Centre for Educational Development, Poland): Polish open e-textbooks project and the „Digital School” program.

Presentation of the “Opening Up Education” Initiative:
Ricardo Ferreira (DG Education and Culture, European Commission)

Questions and answers.

The meeting will be moderated by Alek Tarkowski (European Policy Advisor, Creative Commons).

The event will take place on the 18th of February (Tuesday) at 8.15-10.00, in the Members’ Salon, Altiero Spinelli Building, European Parliament.

Please note that badges are needed to enter the European Parliament building. Badges will be handed out to participants at the Place du Luxembourg entrance. Persons with European Parliament badges should enter through the rue Wiertz entrance (closer to the salon).

If you plan attending the event, please RSVP by sending email to: rsvp@oerpolicy.eu

(Information about the event (PDF) and event poster (PNG) – please share!)

This blog post was written by Alek Tarkowski and originally published on the European Open Education Policy Project website. It is licensed under CC BY 3.0.

Today we’re beginning our discussion period for the Draft Statement of Intent for the ShareAlike Licenses. Because of the new provision in the 4.0 ShareAlike licenses allowing licensees to use SA works in Adapted Material under the conditions of a later license version, we are working on a statement of intent that publicly commits to attributes of the ShareAlike licenses that CC will keep constant in future versions. The statement is meant to address concerns about what may happen with future versions of SA, and what it means for licensors.

You can view the initial announcement to the license development list, and the announcement of the new revision and final discussion period.

Many of you are familiar with the existing statement of intent on the scope of ShareAlike, made in preparation for Wikipedia’s migration from GFDL to CC BY-SA, which we wrote about in 2008. This statement isn’t a replacement for it; instead, it will be a supplement to the commitments made there. The 10 items in the current discussion draft include a commitment to a public discussion process for all future license versions, as well as a commitment not to narrow the scope of future versions (though it could be expanded). Items 9 and 10 of the draft are proposals included for consideration, but are unlikely to appear in the final document.

We are discussing the development of this statement on the license development list before publication so that the CC community can provide its thoughtful guidance and feedback before we make this long-term commitment. (You can sign up here to join the discussion.) It will remain open for comment until February 21.

Update (February 19): After hearing community feedback, we’ve decided not to publish this now, but instead to revisit it at a later date as more general versioning principles for all of the CC licenses.