To make open sharing of research outputs the norm in climate science, Creative Commons, SPARC and EIFL are proud to launch a 4-year Open Climate Campaign with funding from Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, which builds on planning funds from the Open Society Foundations. Climate change, and the resulting harm to our global biodiversity, is one of the world’s most pressing challenges. While the existence of climate change and the resulting loss of biodiversity is certain, knowledge and data about these global challenges and the possible solutions, mitigations and actions to tackle them are too often not publicly accessible.

Many researchers, governments, and global environmental organizations recognize the importance of sharing research openly to accelerate progress, but lack cohesive strategies and mechanisms to facilitate effective knowledge sharing and collaboration across disciplinary and geographic borders.

During the COVID-19 crisis, the power of open access to democratize knowledge sharing, accelerate discovery, promote research collaboration, and bring together the efforts of global stakeholders to tackle the pandemic took center stage, as scientists embraced the immediate, open sharing of preprints, research articles, data and code. This adoption of openness contributed to the rapid sequencing and sharing of the virus’s genome, the quick development of therapeutics, and the fastest development of effective vaccines in human history. The lessons learned during the pandemic can and should be applied to accelerate progress on other urgent problems facing our society.

We now have the opportunity to take open access lessons learned from the COVID-19 experience, and intentionally craft a coordinated campaign to apply it to an equally essential challenge — climate change.

When knowledge about climate change and biodiversity is not freely and openly available to all, only part of humanity is able to help build on that knowledge. When only some people are able to contribute to that knowledge, new insights and possible solutions are missing. When the data that supports research is inaccessible, scientists cannot fully assess or replicate results. Addressing a challenge as dramatic as the climate crisis and its effects on global biodiversity will require that everything we know is available to everyone to understand and augment. The Campaign will go beyond just sharing climate and biodiversity knowledge, to expand the inclusive, just and equitable knowledge policies and practices that enable better sharing.

This global Open Climate Campaign will:

• Bring attention to the issue of access to knowledge on climate change particularly to researchers who are producing the knowledge and informing them of tools that can open their research outputs.
• Work directly with national governments, funders and environmental organizations to identify legal and policy barriers; help governments create, adopt, implement equitable open access policies to overcome them; and make it easier to open and share their climate change research, data and educational resources.
• Identify, engage, and contribute to draft international frameworks to include funder open access policy recommendations, and promote the public benefits of open access knowledge.
• Identify important existing climate and biodiversity research publications not already open access, and unbind those seminal publications to make them open access.
  • We will also explore tactics to facilitate changes in publisher actions to ensure future climate and biodiversity research is open access.
• Engage with researchers, universities and policy makers from traditionally excluded groups and geographical regions to ensure inclusive outcomes throughout.

We look forward to mobilizing researchers, national governments, funders and environmental organizations by providing them with direct, hands-on support to open access to knowledge about climate change and biodiversity preservation.

CC, SPARC and EIFL are already succeeding at helping national governments adopt open access policies to share knowledge with the public. On 26 August, the U.S. Government published new guidance for all federal agencies to make all publicly funded research and related data fully open immediately upon publication (read posts about the US announcement from CC and SPARC). The Open Climate Campaign will support more policy work like this, with more national governments, funders and environmental organizations, to foster the knowledge sharing policies and practices we need to empower everyone to learn about and contribute to climate change and biodiversity solutions.

To learn more about the Open Climate Campaign or to connect, please visit the Open Climate Campaign website.

Read the press release of the Campaign’s launch.

The post CC Partners with SPARC and EIFL to Launch a 4-Year Open Climate Campaign appeared first on Creative Commons.

Mountain View, CA 30 Aug 2022: Creative Commons, SPARC and EIFL today announce a new 4-year, $4-million (USD) grant from Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, to fund the Open Climate Campaign.

This grant, which builds on $450,000 (USD) in planning funds from the Open Society Foundations, will fund a four-year campaign to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity by promoting open access to research.

“While the reality of climate change and the resulting loss of biodiversity is certain, the research about these global challenges and the possible actions to tackle them are too often not publicly accessible. In order to solve these pressing problems, the knowledge about them must be made immediately and freely open to all,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director at SPARC.

“The Campaign has assembled experts from across the fields of climate change, biodiversity, open science, scholarly publishing and open education to develop a campaign that we believe will lead to the open sharing of research outputs as the norm for researchers, governments, funders and environmental organizations,” said Rima Kupryte, Director at Electronic Information for Libraries.

The Campaign will:

• Bring attention to the issue of access to knowledge on climate change and biodiversity.
• Work directly with national governments, funders and environmental organizations to create open access policies and make it easier to share their climate change content.
• Identify, engage and contribute to draft international frameworks to include open access policy recommendations.
• Identify important existing climate and biodiversity research publications not already open access and help them move to open access where possible. We will also explore tactics to facilitate changes in publisher actions to ensure climate and biodiversity research is open access.
• Engage with researchers, universities and policy makers in traditionally excluded geographical regions to ensure inclusive outcomes throughout.

“Climate change is the most pressing global challenge facing humanity. When research and data are closed behind paywalls and people are excluded from the conversation, progress is stifled and we all lose out. This campaign will ensure inclusive, just and equitable access to the essential knowledge we will all need to fight the climate crisis,” said Catherine Stihler, CEO at Creative Commons.

“OSF is thrilled to partner with the Arcadia Fund to support Creative Commons, SPARC, and EIFL, global leaders of the open access movement, to launch the Open Climate Campaign. The quick response from the international research and publishing communities to make all research on COVID-19, and now monkeypox, openly available, demonstrates that to properly address the world’s greatest challenges, research needs to be open. OSF has called for all research to be made openly available, since we helped to define open access to research twenty years ago. I believe the Open Climate Campaign will serve as a model for opening research in other critical fields,” said Melissa Hagemann, Senior Program Officer at the Open Society Foundations.

More information can be found at openclimatecampaign.org.

About

Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world’s pressing challenges.

SPARC
SPARC is a non-profit advocacy organization that supports systems for research and education that are open by default and equitable by design.

EIFL
EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) works with libraries in Africa, Asia Pacific and Europe to enable access to knowledge for education, learning, research and sustainable community development.

Arcadia Fund
Arcadia is a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. It supports charities and scholarly institutions that preserve cultural heritage and the environment. Arcadia also supports projects that promote open access and all of its awards are granted on the condition that any materials produced are made available for free online. Since 2002, Arcadia has awarded more than $910 million to projects around the world.

Open Society Foundations
The Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, are the world’s largest private funder of independent groups working for justice, democratic governance, and human rights.

Media Contact
Nate Angell <press@creativecommons.org>
Director of Communications & Community
Creative Commons

The post Press Release: New Four-Year, $4 Million Open Climate Campaign Will Open Knowledge to Solve Challenges in Climate and Biodiversity appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today the United States White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued dramatic guidance to all US federal agencies: update all policies to require that all federally funded research and data is available for the public to freely access and re-use “in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication.”

Creative Commons celebrates this big news along with the wider open community that we have worked with for so long to ensure publicly funded resources are freely available and openly licensed (or dedicated to the public domain) by default. The public deserves to have uninhibited, equitable and immediate access to use and re-use the research, data, educational resources, software and other content it funds. Our collective ability to create and share digital public goods to create a better world requires it. This new OSTP guidance realizes essential elements of that vision.

Importantly, this memo removes the current 12-month embargo period for access to federally funded research, and it makes the research data openly available in machine readable formats. All US agencies have up to three years to fully implement their updated policies, including ending the optional 12-month embargo. See OSTP’s two blog posts for more detail on this historic announcement (1 / 2).

This action is in line with the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and brings the US Government in line with other governments who have established open access policies and principles to ensure their public investments support the public good.

The US government spends over $80 billion each year funding research in order to cure diseases, mitigate climate change, advance green energy, and more. Governments around the world do the same. Yet the copyright to publicly funded research is often turned over to commercial journals, placed behind paywalls, and then sold back to the public which has already paid for it. This model has always been unacceptable, and the need for governments to ask commercial journals to provide temporary open access to COVID-19 and monkeypox research has made it even more so.

Beyond systematically opening access to existing knowledge, the OSTP memo also requires US federal agencies to expand who contributes to new knowledge. As our colleagues at SPARC explain, the guidance “asks agencies to take measures to reduce inequities in both the publishing of and access to federally funded research publications and data, especially among individuals from underserved backgrounds and those who are early in their careers.”

Working to establish inclusive, just and equitable knowledge is at the heart of CC’s strategy to go beyond just sharing to enable better sharing. If we want to solve the world’s most pressing problems, knowledge about and contributions to those problems must be open. How can we possibly come up with global solutions for climate change, cancer, poverty, clean water and more if everyone is not able to access and contribute to the research, data and educational resources about these challenges? Answer: we cannot.

This OSTP policy memo is a significant win for open access research, and we hope more national governments around the world implement similar open policies. This is a critical step toward the scientific knowledge sharing model we all need, and there is more work to do. If we want to move beyond mere access and towards better sharing of the knowledge we collectively produce and use, we need to work toward (1) open licensing to ensure open re-use rights, and (2) community owned and managed public knowledge infrastructure.

Open Re-Use Rights

CC has, for 20 years, called for open access research policies that require the CC BY license on research articles, CC0 on the research data, and a zero embargo period. The OSTP memo does not specifically call for open licensing, but instead indicates agency plans should describe: “The circumstances or prerequisites needed to make the publications freely and publicly available by default, including any use and re-use rights, and which restrictions, including attribution, may apply.” While this is a good start, CC looks forward to working with the ​Subcommittee on Open Science (which will decide which agency public access plans are compliant with the new guidance) and to provide direct support to US agencies on best practices for open licensing and attribution as they update their public access plans.

Public Knowledge Infrastructure

As the scholarly research community and libraries continue to struggle with high subscription fees and/or expensive article processing charges (APCs), Diamond Open Access is emerging as an interesting model for ensuring inclusive and equitable access to both read and submit research articles to community / academic owned and maintained open infrastructure. CC recently endorsed the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access. CC looks forward to partnering with governments, civil society organizations and researchers to examine and redesign unjust, inequitable knowledge systems, and guide open communities to new, equitable open knowledge models that are designed for the public good. We’ll be writing more about Diamond Open Access and Diamond Open Education models in future posts.

As we continue to work toward fully open re-use rights in every country and global public knowledge infrastructure, Creative Commons congratulates the Biden-Harris Administration for their ongoing leadership on this critical policy issue. CC stands ready to support OSTP and US agencies as they update and implement their open access policies over the coming years. For support from Creative Commons, please contact: Dr. Cable Green, Director of Open Knowledge.

The post A Big Win for Open Access: United States Mandates All Publicly Funded Research Be Freely Available with No Embargo appeared first on Creative Commons.

Hi Creative Commoners! We are back with a new episode of CC’s Open Minds … from Creative Commons podcast. On this episode, CC’s Chief Operating Officer, Anna Tumadóttir, sits down for an interesting conversation with Sam Williams, the co-founder and CEO of Arweave, the company that created the Arweave protocol, a permanent archive of human knowledge and experiences on a blockchain. Creative Commons licenses are the first set of licensing standards to be deployed on Arweave. Sam has been immersed in open source since he was a kid, and started learning to code when he was nine. So it’s no surprise that now he’s passionate about building innovative software and solving complex problems in computer networking, and has built extensive experience in real-world mechanism design and implementation. When he’s not working on Arweave, Sam actively participates in the decentralized web space as technical advisor and mentor of blockchain projects.

• Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and more. You can also subscribe via the show’s RSS feed.
• Episode transcript: Text // PDF // Doc

Please subscribe to the show in whatever podcast app you use, so you don’t miss any of our conversations with people working to make the internet and our global culture more open and collaborative.

The post Open Minds Podcast: Sam Williams of Arweave appeared first on Creative Commons.

Sharing matters. Thanks to the digital revolution, we share things like never before, from scientific research to family photos, from day-to-day life to college courses — and all instantaneously. The variety and volume of sharing today was unimaginable even just a decade ago. Now social media and publishing platforms, smartphones, cheap data, and expanded internet access have enabled more sharing, both in forms that bring us joy and connection, and in the spread of lies, hate and misinformation. Our digital life reflects human nature in all its complexity, highlighting both the good and the bad.

All this sharing has created a flood of new copyrighted works — practically everyone is now a published author, many times over, when we think of all our social media postings — but is the current copyright paradigm working in our interest?

Copyright law is a strand of intellectual property law that affects us all, helping decide what we can read, listen to, watch and share online. It impacts creators, innovators and users of content. We all agree that creators should be fairly rewarded for their works. The economic argument that stronger protection for authors’ rights will inevitably lead to more gains for individual creators may appear convincing in the abstract. However, in practice, the economic argument does not turn out to be persuasive, because extending copyright terms from a few decades to life plus 70 years has not materially increased earnings for the majority of individual creators. Instead, it has generated greater monopolies, benefiting select corporations whose profit motives lift only a few star players. The vast majority of creators do not experience the benefits of the current copyright system first hand. When culture is paywalled, rented and held for profit, when knowledge is locked away, when our libraries are threatened and educators diminished, there’s a chill cast on how our society interoperates, and ultimately on the health of our democracy.

Onerous copyright rules, benefiting the few and not the many, obstruct our access to culture, the knowledge we share, and the society we care about. In order to empower individual creators and safeguard our democracy, Creative Commons (CC) has developed an alternative system to the onerous all rights reserved copyright rules, enabling a commons of knowledge and culture which is freely accessible to everyone, everywhere. We offer a set of open licenses and public domain tools free for anyone to use — a new system where creators get to make their own choices about which rights they want to keep and which rights they want to share. By making their own choices for sharing, creators can reach new and expanded audiences, and people across the planet can access works and ideas to build new creations. Our licenses are now the global standard for sharing content, for creators, researchers, educators, librarians, archivists and governments.

As CC celebrates 20 years of facilitating the sharing of content across the planet, it is important to reflect on what we have learned.

Firstly, our strategic shift away from sharing just for sharing’s sake to working for better sharing, helps us address the careful balance between sharing that is in the public interest, and sharing which is not. This is important at a time when all the benefits that the internet has brought to us seem to be so quickly forgotten, and the predominant narrative is around “harm” rather than public interest. At CC, we want to shift this narrative back to the importance of why sharing matters and how we can do it better. This is why we are an organizing partner in the nascent Better Internet movement, and are actively advocating around the world to ensure that human values and public interest are front and center in our online world.

Secondly, time and time again, we see digital public infrastructure and goods taken for granted. At a time when the public interest often stan

ds in direct contrast to the commercial interest of the creative industries and large tech firms, we need public investment in the structures that underpin the open commons. If we are not careful, the internet will be just a collection of those company towns, where you get paid in company scrip, can only buy from the company store, and only hear the company line and see the company viewpoint. With democracy already in a fragile state and open societies threatened, we need investment in the infrastructure that protects the public interest. Creative Commons is part of this public infrastructure. Without it, we will be poorer, less open and less democratic.

Thirdly, CC needs to be better at publicizing and promoting our work, to reach more people, so that our tools and services can be used to help expand the open commons of knowledge and culture even further. Our impact dwarfs our resources. Even though people use the open commons daily, the vast majority of the public have never heard of CC, or if they have, they are either surprised there is an organization behind the licenses at all, or they think that we are the size of Wikimedia — when in reality CC has a staff of 20, and Wikimedia over 550. We at CC recognize this challenge, and this is why we are already working with our existing network to build a new community of young and emerging leaders who can carry the torch of open knowledge and culture forward into the future.

Finally, the world we live in today is different from the one when CC was first created. Looking forward, as I mark my 2nd anniversary at CC, I see our challenges and opportunities are to recognize and consolidate the impact we’ve made in supporting the growth of the commons, but also to continue that impact in this emerging era of AI, big data, and web3 to effect positive change in our world. We have reshaped the copyright regime in 20 years, becoming the global standard for open content sharing. Now we stand at the cusp of the next 20 years, encountering new places and spaces for dialogue, and championing a new generation of practitioners and advocates, but most importantly, continuing to build a commons of knowledge and culture that is accessible to everyone, everywhere. I look forward to working with you all to make this vision a reality.

 

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The post Sharing Matters: What We’ve Learned at Creative Commons appeared first on Creative Commons.