Today, the White House issued a Directive supporting public access to publicly-funded research.

John Holdren, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, “has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research.”

Each agency covered by the Directive (54 KB PDF) must “Ensure that the public can read, download, and analyze in digital form final peer reviewed manuscripts or final published documents within a timeframe that is appropriate for each type of research conducted or sponsored by the agency.”

The Directive comes out after a multi-year campaign organized by Open Access advocates, and reflects a groundswell of grassroots support for public access to the scientific research that the public pays for. Of course, the White House Directive is issued on the heels of the introduction of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR). Both the Directive and the FASTR legislation are complementary approaches to ensuring that the public can access and use the scientific research it pays for.

We applaud this important policy Directive. While the Directive and FASTR do not specifically require the application of open licenses to the scientific research outputs funded with federal tax dollars, both actions represent crucial steps toward increasing public access to research.

There are many ways we can measure the effect of the work we do — count the number of objects licensed with CC licenses, count the number of users who have used CC licenses, count the number of works created by reuse of works licensed with CC licenses, perhaps many other ways. But the one that is most immediately visible, and most satisfying, is seeing events of spontaneous openness appear as is for the international celebration of Open Data Day taking place tomorrow, February 23. Well, perhaps not so spontaneous, because organizing events takes planning, work, contacts, brainstorming, publicizing, and more.

Our own Billy Meinke is organizing an event at the CC HQ in Mt. View, and has also written more on the event here and around the world in a guest blog post on PLOS. Check it out, organize an event, or attend one near you. Heck, attend one far away by joining in over the web where possible. After all, that is how the net works.

On March 2nd, the Creative Commons & P2PU School of Open will join forces with Wikimedia at the Wikimedia Germany offices in Berlin! As part of Open Education Week, CC Germany and Wikimedia Germany are kicking things off early with a workshop to introduce P2PU and the School of Open, and to create and translate School of Open courses in German, in addition to brainstorming ideas for new courses about Wikipedia as part of the School.

Event details

What: School of Open workshop
When: 2nd of March, 11 – 16:00
Where: Wikimedia Germany Offices, Obentrautstr. 72, 10963 Berlin
Who: Wikimedia Germany, Creative Commons Germany, P2PU community, all enthusiastic promoters of free knowledge with the desire to share their knowledge
RSVP: Space will accommodate up to 25 participants; please send an email to legal@creativecommons.de by Feb 27th so that we can keep track of who’s coming.
Language: Likely German

From Wikimedia Germany’s blog (and via Google translate),

“We want to start the year with a workshop with Creative Commons and the initiative “School of Open”! The initiative of Creative Commons and the Peer-2-Peer University (P2PU) aims to develop online courses that help you create free content and tools to use and develop. There are English courses on Wikipedia and the use of free content, but as of yet nothing in German. Also, the subject of “free educational content” is not yet represented in courses. So there is still much to do. As part of Open Education Week further work is required.

Together, we want to work intensively on the expansion of the existing courses. It will focus on tools and topics related to free access to knowledge. Anyone can create courses and remix existing courses on their own — but it’s best to share. After some brief input from Creative Commons, we will start working. So bring your ideas, and let’s share our knowledge!”

To participate, please RSVP to legal@creativecommons.de by February 27th!

For the fifth year, Creative Commons will take part in the Google Policy Fellowship program. It’s fantastic to see that Google has expanded the number and diversity of groups involved in the fellowship program. This year there are participating organizations from Africa, Latin America, Europe and North America.

The Google Policy Fellowship program offers undergraduate, graduate, and law students interested in Internet and technology policy the opportunity to spend the summer contributing to the public dialogue on these issues, and exploring future academic and professional interests. Fellows will have the opportunity to work at public interest organizations at the forefront of debates on broadband and access policy, content regulation, copyright and trademark reform, consumer privacy, open government, and more.

The 2013 Google Policy Fellow will receive a grant to work at Creative Commons’ office in Mountain View, California.

Past CC Google Policy Fellows have worked on a wide variety of projects. These have included surveying intellectual property and licensing policies of philanthropic foundations, research on the welfare impact of Creative Commons across various fields, and an investigation of the characterization of Creative Commons within U.S. legal scholarship.

We look for motivated candidates with partially-developed ideas in exploring a particular interest/expertise area, short research project, or related activity within the broad spectrum of open licensing and the commons. In 2013 we are particularly interested in working with fellows interested in supporting education and advocacy efforts around open policies so that publicly funded resources are openly licensed resources. One specific project we are looking for assistance on is the development of an Open Policy Network. We are very flexible in accommodating project ideas that will be mutually beneficial to the candidate and CC. The project work with CC will not be supervised by an attorney.

Please be sure to apply before March 15, 2013, and good luck.

It’s a fitting start to CC’s second decade as a license steward that we are publishing for comment the third and final draft of version 4.0.

This draft has been long in the making, but we think it’s all the better for the extended discussion and drafting period, and therefore that much closer to finalization and realizing its full potential as an international license suite.

New in Draft 3

Much of our attention since publishing draft 2 has been focused on improving the license in ways tied to key objectives we had in mind when this process started a little more than a year ago.

Sui generis database rights – a weighty factor in our decision to version – are now handled more thoroughly and clearly. The changes introduced in draft 3 will be of particular benefit for data projects and communities forced to manage the complexities of licensing those rights in addition to copyright. The 4.0 suite will provide more certainty about application of the license and the obligations of re-users of data where those right apply. The revisions also reinforce CC’s policy of combatting the expansion of sui generis database rights beyond the borders of the few countries where they exist. Those rights and obligations remain safely confined.

Interoperability has been a second, important objective of this versioning process. Our BY and BY-NC licenses have never specified how adaptations may be licensed. This is a source of confusion at times for users, especially for those remixing materials under a variety of licenses whether within or external to the CC suite. In draft 3, we have introduced provisions specifying how contributions to adaptations built from BY and BY-NC licensed material must be licensed. The rule we introduce should be intuitive for most (and has always been true), and will be easily recognized by others because of its foundation in copyright. We are eager to hear feedback on whether it’s a workable rule in practice. If so, then these new provisions will clear the way for increased interoperability between those two licenses and other public licenses.

We have also introduced a number of features to better ensure that works can be reused as the licenses (and licensors) intend. We recognize that licensors are often required or encouraged to apply technological protection measures when distributing their works through large platforms, and that those TPMs can prevent the public from using the CC-licensed work as the license permits (reproduce, modify, share, etc.). The license is now clear that if users choose to circumvent those measures in order to exercise rights the CC licenses grant, the licensor may not object. In some situations others (such as the platform provider) may have the right to object, and in some circumstances and jurisdictions doing may still be a criminal offense. Our licenses do not help in those situations (and should not be relied upon to protect users in those cases). But at least between licensors and those reusers, circumvention is expressly authorized.

Several other changes have been introduced to improve the smooth functioning of the licenses, including a few worth highlighting here:

• Although we have decided not to pursue a proposal that would have required licensors to offer representations and warranties, we now prominently highlight important before-licensing considerations that encourage rights clearances and proper marking of third-party content. These practices and considerations have long been promoted by CC. Placing them in closer proximity to the licenses educates licensors and encourages responsible licensing practices, and alerts the public to the limitations of the licenses.
• The license now includes a mechanism that allows for automatic reinstatement of the license when a violation is cured within 30 days of discovery, while preserving a licensor’s right to seek remedies for those violations. This was a popular request, particularly by institutions wanting to use high-quality CC-licensed content in important contexts but who worried about losing their license permanently for an inadvertent violation.

Public Discussion – Featured Topics

In this third discussion period, we will be returning our attention to ShareAlike compatibility, the centerpiece of our interoperability agenda. We will take a harder look at the mechanism necessary to permit one-way compatibility out from BY-SA to other similarly spirited licenses like GPLv3, and whether one-way compatibility is, in fact, desired. We will also develop compatibility criteria and processes, though that may not conclude until after the 4.0 suite is launched. We expect to explore the introduction of a compatibility mechanism in BY-NC-SA similar to that already present in BY-SA. Draft 3 incorporates the changes that would accomplish all of this, if the decision is made to pursue these actions following vetting with our community.

Internationalization will also be a highlight of this discussion period. We will be making a final push with our legal affiliates to fine tune the legal code so the licenses operate as intended and are enforceable around the world. As part of this, we expect a full discussion on the new interpretation clause that establishes a default rule for how the license should be interpreted.

Other topics we will be covering include attribution and some finessing of those requirements. And as publication time draws nearer, we will also be having discussions about the license deed and related matters. You can find a complete list of open topics, a list of changes in draft 3 and a side-by-side comparison of Draft 2 and Draft 3 (237 KB PDF) on our 4.0 wiki, as well as downloads and links to all six draft licenses.

We look forward to hearing from you in this final comment stage. Check out all six of the 4.0d3 licenses, and join the CC license development and versioning list, or contribute ideas directly to the 4.0 wiki.

Thanks again for a productive comment period. Thanks for the many valuable contributions to date!