Today the University of California (UC) Academic Senate announced the adoption of a system-wide open access policy for future research articles generated by UC faculty. The articles will be made publicly available for free via UC’s eScholarship repository.

According to the press release, the University of California open access policy will cover 8,000 faculty who author approximately 40,000 articles each year. From the UC statement:

By granting a license to the University of California prior to any contractual arrangement with publishers, faculty members can now make their research widely and publicly available, re-use it for various purposes, or modify it for future research publications. Previously, publishers had sole control of the distribution of these articles.

It appears that authors will have the option of depositing their articles under open licenses, such as Creative Commons licenses. The FAQ says,

Uses of the article are governed by the copyright license under which it is distributed, and faculty authors choose which license to use at the point of deposit. Faculty members may choose to restrict commercial re-use by choosing a Creative Commons license with a “Non Commercial” (NC) restriction when they deposit their article; or they may choose to allow it by choosing a license like the “Attribution only” license (CC BY). If no license is specified, a non-commercial license will be used by default.

Faculty are also able to opt-out of the policy on a per-article basis, which may limit the effectiveness of the policy overall if opt-outs become commonplace.

The UC policy builds on existing open access policies in California, such as the one at UCSF. Here’s a link the full text of the policy. Congratulations to UC for passing this policy, and we hope that faculty will embrace sharing research articles under open licenses.

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Round 2 of the School of Open starts August 5! Sign up for courses on copyright for educators, open science, and much more.	The first decade of CC is over; what’s next? In our new publication The Future of Creative Commons, we lay out the top priorities in all the areas where we work.
Hey, CC musicians! You have only one more week to enter the Free! Music! Contest!	Autodesk announced that its support and learning content for its 2014 product line is now available under Creative Commons licenses.

In other news:

• Join Team Open! Creative Commons is looking for an operations engineer.
• The featured films have been announced for the first-ever Nordic Creative Commons Film Festival. Schedule your own NCCFF screening!
• The Saylor Foundation recently launched a new set of free, CC-licensed, K-12 courses in language arts and mathematics.
• Indie videogame designer Nick Liow wants to change the way you think about the public domain.
• Myanmar’s New Education Highway is a nonprofit project that could not exist without open educational resources.
• Learn about UC Irvine’s OpenChem project, a set of openly licensed chemistry lectures equivalent to four years’ worth of classes.

If news like this is important to you, consider making a donation to Creative Commons.

We’re looking for an operations (DevOps) engineer to join us in creating next generation products and services that enable sharing, curating, remixing, and collaborating on open content.

The operations engineer is a full-time position reporting to the director of product strategy, and is a unique role which provides hands-on technical engineering of our server and application environments we use to provide rock-solid, scalable services to the public, while at the same time also working within the community to recruit and create trusted groups of DevOps volunteers. As such, the operations engineer works closely with the rest of the Products & Technology team, including other developers and user experience designers, as well as Creative Commons staff and particularly with community volunteers.

Read the full job description and instructions for applying.

This morning, Autodesk announced that its Media & Entertainment (M&E) support and learning content for its 2014 product line is now available under Creative Commons licenses; that’s 20,000 pages of documentation, 70 videos, and 140 downloadable 3D asset files under CC BY-NC-SA and CC BY-NC-ND licenses.

“Autodesk embracing Creative Commons licensing is a big win for Creative Commons, but more importantly, it’s a big win for the design community online. The power of the internet lies in how easy it is for people to share and build on each other’s work. CC licenses make that kind of sharing possible without the law getting in the way. In opening its resources, Autodesk is demonstrating that it understands the capacity for creativity and collaboration among its community of users.” – Creative Commons CEO Cathy Casserly

According to a press release that Autodesk released this morning, the Open Learning Initiative was actually a direct response to demands from the community of users of Autodesk products. Paul Duguay, a 3D and multimedia studies instructor at the Collège Communautaire du Nouveau-Brunswick in Canada, discovered a series of videos on the Autodesk 3ds Max Learning Channel that perfectly fit his curriculum needs. Duguay wanted to be able translate the audio into French and publish the videos on the college’s website. Autodesk started licensing its content under CC so that community members like Duguay could use the material to its full potential.

It’s fantastic to see an industry leader in design software choosing to open its documentation and training content to its community. Autodesk has also demonstrated its commitment to open by donating to Creative Commons at the Innovator level. Thank you to Autodesk for making an investment in a more creative, collaborative internet.

Read the full press release.

Update: Here’s some nice coverage by San Francisco Chronicle’s James Temple:

“For a company as prominent as Autodesk to do this, it sends an important signal to other major players: We think that’s a service to our customers we want to provide,” said Corynne McSherry, intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Hopefully other companies will then take a look and say, ‘Maybe we should do that too.’”

You’ve already heard us talk about the the Nordic Creative Commons Film Festival the latest in a growing movement of CC filmmakers and festival organizers changing how films are funded, produced, and distributed. Last week, festival organizer María Ibáñez emailed me to let me know that the list of CC-licensed films featured in the festival has been announced.

One thing that makes NCCFF interesting is that anyone can host a screening. Last week, the organizers also launched a cool signup platform where you can select which films you’d like to screen and add your screening to the official calendar. More information here.