We are continuing our practice of providing official plaintext versions of the licenses, as we did with version 3.0.

• BY 4.0 (plaintext)
• BY-SA 4.0 (plaintext)
• BY-NC 4.0 (plaintext)
• BY-NC-SA 4.0 (plaintext)
• BY-ND 4.0 (plaintext)
• BY-NC-ND 4.0 (plaintext)

As said in the previous entry: “For most works, plaintext legalcode doesn’t matter as linking directly to the deeds (say with the copy-paste output you get with the license chooser) is good enough, even ideal. And it’s important to note that the XHTML licenses are still the canonical versions. But for some projects plaintext legalcode may be a very good thing. For example, it is traditional practice in free and open source software projects to bundle your licenses along with your project. More and more FOSS projects are using Creative Commons licenses or CC0 for their non-software content, so having plaintext legalcode will probably be very useful in these instances. Additionally, some other projects which release their content in a way that is largely offline may benefit from plaintext legalcode.”

If you need to mark your work with licensing information in plaintext, here is an example to follow:

<WORK> (c) by <AUTHOR(S)>

<WORK> is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

You should have received a copy of the license along with this
work.  If not, see <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/>. 

(The first line in this example is optional.)

For reference, here are the updated examples of how you would annotate your works for the 4.0 licenses.

CC BY 4.0:

<WORK> (c) by <AUTHOR(S)>

<WORK> is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

You should have received a copy of the license along with this
work. If not, see <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>. 

CC BY-SA 4.0:

<WORK> (c) by <AUTHOR(S)>

<WORK> is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

You should have received a copy of the license along with this
work. If not, see <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/>. 

CC BY-ND 4.0:

<WORK> (c) by <AUTHOR(S)>

<WORK> is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You should have received a copy of the license along with this
work. If not, see <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/>. 

CC BY-NC 4.0:

<WORK> (c) by <AUTHOR(S)>

<WORK> is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

You should have received a copy of the license along with this
work. If not, see <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/>. 

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0:

<WORK> (c) by <AUTHOR(S)>

<WORK> is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

You should have received a copy of the license along with this
work. If not, see <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/>. 

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0:

<WORK> (c) by <AUTHOR(S)>

<WORK> is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You should have received a copy of the license along with this
work. If not, see <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/>. 

At the age of 15, Jack Andraka developed a new method for detecting a rare type of pancreatic cancer. Like all scientific discoveries, Jack’s research built on the work of other researchers. Unlike those researchers, however, he lacked access to the expensive scholarly databases usually paid for by their universities. Fortunately, open access databases carrying a Creative Commons license gave him the tools he needed.

“Access to knowledge is, you know, a basic human right,” Jack says. “Knowledge should not be commoditized; it wants to be free.”

There’s been a lot of talk about open access to science research over the past year. In February, the U.S. White House issued a directive requiring that most publicly funded research be available to the public. It was a step in the right direction, but the fight is far from over.

For example, not all of the papers Jack needed were free. He spent nearly a thousand dollars paying to read the research he needed that wasn’t open. He’s the first to admit that he was lucky: for most young scientists around the world, those expenses aren’t an option. “We need the best and most recent research to be available to everyone.”

If you think that everyone should have access to the most current scientific knowledge, then stand with Jack and thousands of other scientists who believe in open by making a gift to Creative Commons.

The Brin Wojcicki Foundation has agreed to match every donation that Creative Commons receives in January 2014.

GS2013 Final Day in Hall / Ibtihel Zaatouri / CC BY-SA

You might remember our announcement a few months ago that Cathy Casserly will be stepping down as CEO of Creative Commons this year. Today, we’re excited to officially open the search for the new CEO. Our friends at m/Oppenheim Associates are helping to coordinate the search.

From m/Oppenheim’s announcement:

Creative Commons is at an inflection point in its history. In the coming years, CC will pursue strategies that expand use of its licenses and promote a robust knowledge-sharing ecosystem. The organization recognizes that many paths lay open for pursuing these objectives, and the search for a new chief executive offers an opportunity to explore new ideas for services, products, advocacy, policies and programs. The new leader will oversee continued stewardship of CC’s licenses and also seek new opportunities to expand knowledge-sharing through the internet.

Download the job description (78 KB PDF)

thank you note for every language / woodleywonderworks / CC BY

As we take stock of our achievements in 2013 and plan our legal work for the year ahead, we would be remiss not to pause and express our deepest gratitude to the many individuals and organizations whose contributions made one of CC’s most significant projects in 2013 – the development of license version 4.0 – an overwhelming success. This milestone was made possible because of the dedication of our diverse, talented, and extensive CC community. Our community brought legal expertise and practical experience to bear in our policy deliberations, and continued to hold us accountable for running an inclusive, transparent process. CC is thankful for your ongoing efforts and your trust in our stewardship. The version 4.0 licenses are all the better for your participation.

Although many more could be thanked, we in particular wish to recognize the contributions of a few:

• the CC global affiliate network for their legal analysis and drafting assistance, which included participation by representatives from more than 55 jurisdictions over the course of four license drafts;
• the larger CC community of creators and license users who contributed constructively, thoughtfully, and often passionately to our policy debates through 1000+ posts to our license development email list;
• other public license stewards, including the Free Software Foundation and Artlibre.org, for carefully navigating the intricacies of license compatibility and sharing ideas for (hopefully) achieving that goal in the new year;
• our friends and colleagues at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Library of Science, Software Freedom Law Center, Wikimedia Foundation, and other sister organizations, who contributed expertise and insights on difficult policy decisions and considered with us the potential implications of our policy choices;
• CC fellow Mike Linksvayer and consultant Eric Steuer, for their perspectives on past policy decisions and insight into opportunities and challenges for future license adoptions;
• former staff members including Chris Webber, Greg Grossmeier, and Aurelia Schultz, as well as the CC board of directors, particularly Michael Carroll and Molly Van Houweling who provided instrumental guidance and legal expertise throughout the process; and
• as always, our trusted pro bono counsel at Latham & Watkins and Wilson Sonsini.

Looking ahead to 2014, our community will have many additional opportunities to participate in our legal work. In close collaboration with our worldwide affiliate network, we will shortly begin the process of creating and publishing official translations of the 4.0 licenses and related educational materials, including FAQs and implementation tool kits. We will also be returning our attention to ShareAlike compatibility. We will be finalizing the (currently Draft) ShareAlike Statement of Intent, which will be followed by development of ShareAlike compatibility criteria and processes and evaluation of leading candidates for compatibility with BY-SA 4.0. Starting this month, we will also begin publishing a series of blog posts that focus on new features of the 4.0 license suite. The series will explore in more depth implications of the underlying policy decisions reflected in our new licenses, such as the operation of our licenses in the context of text and data mining.

We will also be turning our attention to legal projects set aside while finishing 4.0, such as our work on CC0 translations and other public domain-focused efforts. You can also expect us to solicit your input on important new projects under evaluation and in development. There will be no shortage of opportunities for our community to lend their expertise (and opinions!) as we move forward in 2014.

Thanks once again for contributing to a successful version 4.0 launch. We look forward to continuing our collaborations with all of you in the new year!

Here’s another end of year list: all the awesome things the School of Open community accomplished in 2013. Last year, we highlighted the work we put into materializing School of Open as a concrete entity with goals and people involved. This year, we actually launched the School with a full set of online courses and kick-off events around the world!

But we didn’t stop there. All year long, our volunteers have been contributing in so many fantastic and unexpected ways that it’s been hard to wrap our brains around all the activity. So here’s my attempt at collecting and distilling everything here, as a teaser for the new School of Open landing page that will happen in 2014.

The biggest thing you should note about the School of Open is that it is no longer just a set of online courses sitting on the P2PU platform. It is a global community and movement of volunteers developing and running online or hybrid courses, face-to-face workshops, and real world training programs — all with the purpose of helping people do what they already do better with the aid of open resources and tools.

In 2013, we

• Launched 12 stand-alone courses for anyone to take at any time, with or without others.
• Ran a total of 11 facilitated courses on topics such as: Copyright 4 Educators, Designing Collaborative Workshops, Open Science, CC licensing, Writing Wikipedia Articles, and Why Open?
• Conducted initial research on the impact of some of these courses and completed a research residency with the OER Research Hub in Milton Keynes, England
• Hosted multiple workshops, course sprints, and other events across 5 continents (in countries like England, Germany, Kenya, China, Sudan, Argentina, South Africa, the U.S.)
• Started School of Open Kenya, an after school program for high school students teaching about open educational resources, CC licenses, and the open culture that they engender
• Put on an engineering and design challenge incorporating open source and CC licensing education for university students in China
• Ran a two-week OER summer camp for kids on Luxi island, an island in rural China (more info to follow in a guest blog post)


OER summer camp on Luxi island ( ZHU Renkai / CC BY)

• Launched WikiProject Open, a community of new and experienced Wikipedians, dedicated to improving Wikipedia’s coverage of all things “open” and to using openly licensed content to improve Wikipedia articles in general
• Got the School of Open’s Writing Wikipedia Articles course adopted as part of a formal university course (the University of Mississippi’s “Open Educational Resources and Practices”)
• Piloted P2PU badges for 7 of our facilitated courses! For examples, check out this Remix OER badge and this Intro to Open Science Open Access badge
• Built a human timeline of the open education space! Which we want anyone and everyone to contribute to
• Helped turn a “collaborations across the open space” session at Mozfest into a funded part-time position that will help coordinate our open communities! (more info at this pad)
• Developed support resources for course facilitators, including this comprehensive tip sheet by a facilitator with a 95% retention rate
• Created a couple videos for online conferences, like this one for K-12 educators and this one for Open Ed Week
• Showcased School of Open projects by CC affiliates at the Creative Commons Global Summit in Buenos Aires…

…and more, all of which you can check out in detail on the CC blog at http://creativecommons.org/tag/school-of-open.

In 2014, we will

• Launch our third round of facilitated courses in March. Sign up to be notified when registration opens
• Revamp the School of Open landing page to better reflect our multi-layered activity
• Build out courses in different languages. So far volunteers have expressed interest in translating courses into Spanish, Romanian, Hindi, Swedish, Chinese, Korean, Dutch, French, Arabic, German, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Hebrew… yes, we’ve got our work cut out for us!
• Expand current training programs to other regions; for example, we hope to have similar programs to School of Open Kenya in place in Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania
• Start new courses and training programs in South Africa, Colombia, Uruguay, El Salvador, Argentina, and more!
• Collaborate with our fellow open organizations such as OKFN, Mozilla, Wikimedia, P2PU, and more!
• Do more research! And completing a report of our findings with the OER Research Hub
• Get more SOO courses adopted as part of formal university courses
• Secure professional development credit for teachers/librarians taking Copyright 4 Educators in Australia (and elsewhere)
• Collaborate with the California School Librarians Association (CSLA) to increase CC and OER education in K-12 schools!


Fireworks / Jack-Benny / CC BY-SA

• Run more workshops, especially one for SOO volunteers to get together and grow their respective projects
• Take more pictures. We didn’t have enough this year!

And I could go on, but I’ll stop there. On behalf of the School of Open community, we wish you a Happy Holidays and a wonderful New Year!

If you would like to join us in our endeavors to provide free education opportunities on all things open, introduce yourself at the School of Open Google Group, sign up for announcements, and check out a course (or two or three).

About the School of Open

The School of Open is a global community of volunteers focused on providing free education opportunities on the meaning, application, and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, research, and more. Volunteers develop and run online courses, offline workshops, and real world training programs on topics such as Creative Commons licenses, open educational resources, and sharing creative works. The School of Open is coordinated by Creative Commons and P2PU, a peer learning community and platform for developing and running free online courses.