American University Washington College of Law (AUWCL) has received a three-year grant of $3.8 million from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, for its Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP). The project will study changes needed in international copyright policy to ensure equity in the production of and access to research.

“The COVID pandemic has cast a bright light on inequities in the global research system that restrictive copyright laws perpetuate,” said Professor Sean Flynn, director of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property and the project’s principal investigator. “In many countries, library resources, for example, can only be used ‘on the premises’ of that institution. Use of educational materials is often restricted to use ‘in a classroom.’ Our goal is to promote a system in which every researcher, every student, and every citizen of every country has the ability to engage in modern research activity and enjoy its products, including across borders and utilizing online tools.”

The project will support a network of access to knowledge civil society organizations to form and lead national and regional coalitions of researchers and the institutions that support them. Each coalition will engage in collaborative research projects and facilitate the sharing of research outcomes in their countries and regions. 

Creative Commons will join the Steering Committee, alongside several other organizations, with the goal of driving change in international copyright policy to ensure equity in the production of and access to research.

“We are thrilled to be part of the Arcadia-funded project and contribute to spurring change in international copyright policy,” said CC’s CEO Catherine Stihler. “At Creative Commons, we strive to foster the production, open access and open sharing of research in ways that serve the public interest and we look forward to pursuing this objective in collaboration with other project partners.” 

Read the full press release from the AUWCL here.

The post Creative Commons Joins the American University’s Efforts to Promote the International Right to Research appeared first on Creative Commons.

I’d like to offer a heartfelt thanks to Creative Commons’ longtime General Counsel, Diane Peters, who will be leaving CC at the end of the month to take on new opportunities in 2021. She has served in her staff role at CC since 2008 and as a member of the CC board of directors for many years as its counsel and secretary. Diane has played a key role in nearly every initiative CC has undertaken over the past decade, and the organization will miss her dearly.

Diane led the work to launch the 4.0 versions of CC’s licenses, the CC0 public domain dedication, and CC’s Public Domain Mark—legal tools that have become the gold standard for institutions and individuals wanting to make their copyrighted works freely and openly available for use by anyone in the world. She’s been a critically important figure in supporting and championing CC’s global community, and her leadership of the Open COVID Pledge has been a great demonstration of her innovative thinking. Additionally, her hard work in the GLAM sector has resulted in many major collections of academic materials and cultural works being made openly available to the public—freeing knowledge and culture everywhere for everyone. 

All of us at Creative Commons wish Diane well. We thank her for her service to CC over the past 12 years and are excited for what the future holds for her. The work she’s done at CC has made it much easier for people to share knowledge and creativity with others, and has resulted in a more open and accessible world.

The post Thanking Diane Peters for Her Service to Creative Commons appeared first on Creative Commons.

This is part of a series of posts introducing the projects built by open source contributors mentored by Creative Commons during Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2020 and Outreachy. Mayank Nader was one of those contributors and we are grateful for his work on this project.

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The CC Search Browser Extension allows users to search, filter, and use images in the Public Domain and under Creative Commons licenses. It is heavily inspired by CC Search but at the same time, it offers an experience that is more personalized and collaborative. One of the primary goals of the extension is to complement the user’s workflow and allow them to concentrate on what’s important.

Recently, there have been many improvements to the CC Search Browser Extension and I’ll go through the significant changes in this post.

• New filters

Previously, the extension only supported filtering the content using license, sources, and use case. Now, the extension also supports filtering by image type, file type, aspect ratio, and image size. This will allow users to be more precise in their queries when searching.

• Browsing by source

The extension now has a dynamically updated “sources” section. This opens an avenue for exploration of all the 40+ sources which are currently available in the CC Catalog. This is advantageous for users who are not familiar with the type of content a particular source provides. They might run into a source that has a huge catalog of high-quality images that they are looking for.

• Search by tags

Most of the images have some tags associated with them, which are now shown in the image-detail section. Image tags will allow users to incrementally make their queries better and more specific.

• Related images

In the image detail section of any particular image, you can now see several recommendations. This will help users find a variety of images that fit their requirements and also explore the images that would not usually show up on the initial pages of the search result.

• Improvement to the bookmarks section

The bookmarks section is an important part of the extension. While searching, if you find images that you might use later you can bookmark and save them in the extension.

The bookmarks section has undergone some crucial improvements which have made it significantly faster. Also, now the extension will be able to hold 300 bookmarks (the old version had a limit of only 50). 

We made sure that the updates to the bookmarks section do not remove any previously saved bookmarks. If a user has some old bookmark files that they are using for sharing or archiving, the extension will still be able to recognize and parse those files.

Comparing the rendering of the bookmarked images in the old version and the new version demonstrates the improvement in performance.

• Improved UI

Updating the UI of the extension was necessary to make space for all of the improvements. All the workflows and features in the old version of the extension have been updated to make the new UI very intuitive. 

• Demonstrating a general use case

As I said in the introduction of this post, rather than complicating the workflow of the user, the extension’s goal is to complement it. The extension makes it easier to add images and their attributions to a blog post in WordPress, for example. After you have searched and bookmarked the images, it’s a matter of a few clicks. You can replicate this on Medium, Blogger, or any modern blogging platform. (Evident here!)

• Installation

The latest version of the extension is available for installation on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Microsoft Edge. 

If you are already using the extension, then the extension should have auto-updated. If it has not, the instructions to manually update are written under the FAQ tab in the settings page.

Join the community

Come and tell us about your experience on the Creative Commons Slack via the slack channel: #cc-dev-browser-extension.

Also, check out the project on Github. You can contribute in the form of bug reports, feature requests, or code contributions.

The post New Improvements in the CC Search Browser Extension appeared first on Creative Commons.

“lightning” by duane.schoon is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The CC Open Education Platform is hosting a series of open education “lightning talks” in which open education practitioners will discuss their work (7 minutes) and take questions (2 minutes) in a supportive space. Everyone is welcome. Join us!

All talks will take place in this Jitsi room. Dial-in (backup): +1.512.647.1431  PIN: 1489 6238 59#

In this first round of talks, 25 members of the CC Open Education Platform will present their work over three sessions.

Tuesday, 8 December: 8:00am – 9:30am (PST – Los Angeles time)

• Sue Jones: Cognitively Accessible Math OER
• David Wiley: Sustaining and Improving OER
• Chris Morrison & Jane Secker: How openness helped us address the challenge of copyright and online teaching at a time of crisis
• Nathan Smith: Starting a local consortium to increase collaboration around OER
• Yasin Dahi: Learnful: An open platform for OER authoring and collaboration in Canada
• Christer Gundersen: Crowdsourcing translation of early grade reading resources at scale
• TJ Bliss: Open Education in Idaho Higher Education
• Grif Peterson: Increasing equity with OER through learning circles

Friday, 11 December: 7:30am – 9:00am (PST – Los Angeles time)

• Judith Sebesta: Texas Learn OER
• André Rocha: Fabschools
• Suma Parahakaran: Educating for Human Values and Ethics in Schools
• Yogesh K S: Wikimedia and MediaWiki in Open Education
• Stephen Downes: A Personal Learning Platform
• Hugh McGuire: Where can I find Pressbooks books? Why, the Pressbooks Directory
• Omshivaprakash: Digital archiving to build OER for local languages
• Nate Angell: Open Learning Experience Bingo

Thursday, 17 December: 8:00am – 9:30am (PST – Los Angeles time)

• Roxanne Russell: Part you, part text, part machine, all learning
• Fernando Daguanno: OER are not always textbooks
• Meri McCoy-Thompson: We Are Resilient
• Werner Westermann: Offline OER to mitigate learning loss
• Sarah Hutton: Open from the Start: Strategies for Integrating OER and Open Pedagogical Practice Into First-Year and General Programs at UMass Amherst
• Lance Eaton: The Public Dollar: Finding & Flipping the Value of the Commons
• Rajeeb Dutta: Hello Santali
• Dan McGuire: Geogebra + Illustrative Mathematics + your LMS = Great Teaching and Learning

The post 24 x Open Education Lightning Talks appeared first on Creative Commons.

We at Creative Commons (CC) have long disagreed with the use of digital rights management (DRM) and technological protection measures (TPMs) in the open environment. We believe that DRM and TPMs should not be used to control, limit, prevent or otherwise affect activities and uses allowed under CC licenses’ terms. Plainly, DRM and TPMs are antithetical to the “open” ethos and at odds with the values of sharing that we support.

What is DRM? DRM consists of access control technologies or restrictive licensing agreements that attempt to restrict the use, modification, and distribution of legally-acquired works. Examples include encryption technology used on DVDs, keys (or passwords) with video games or copying restrictions on ebooks. 

DRM goes against the spirit of open sharing

Most creators who choose CC licenses probably don’t want DRM — they want wide distribution, use, and reuse of their content. Generally, we encourage creators to share their content in “downloadable” and “editable” formats (i.e. DRM-free — without any technical restriction to download, copy, or modify) to make it easier for others to benefit from and use the content, including for educational and socially beneficial purposes. We likewise discourage sharing CC-licensed content on platforms, sites or channels that add DRM to the shared content. That way, the spirit of open licensing is upheld and the legitimate expectations of the public regarding the freedoms associated with using openly-licensed content aren’t compromised. 

DRM does a disservice to the public: it blocks legitimate access to the content, thereby posing a threat to the universal, fundamental rights of access to knowledge, science, culture and education.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: standing up against DRM is incredibly important for many communities in the open movement, particularly open education. Of particular importance is the ability for educators and learners to “retain” content and “to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage).” 

DRM poses a dire risk to the principles at the foundation of the open movement. DRM often constitutes an unnecessary obstacle preventing access to and use of content for legitimate purposes. When used in connection with openly-licensed content, DRM does a disservice to the public: it blocks legitimate access to the content, thereby posing a threat to the universal, fundamental rights of access to knowledge, science, culture and education. We at CC will continue to advocate against it.

The post We’re Against Digital Rights Management. Here’s Why. appeared first on Creative Commons.