The Creative Commons (CC) community has an ongoing interest in how traditional and new business models interact with, leverage, and give back to the commons. To address this topic, CC published its book “Made with Creative Commons” to show the full spectrum of open business models using CC licenses. The authors’ goal was to answer what many creators consider one of the most important questions of the digital age: how do creators make money to sustain what they do when they allow the world to freely reuse their work?

Aligned with this work, Instituto Educadigital, a partner with CC Brazil, recently published “Open Innovation in Education- Concepts and Business Models (Portuguese / English)”, a study authored by Priscila Gonsales and Débora Sebriam that explores how the open innovation movement can impact the educational marketplace. The study explores and addresses public policies that provide incentives for publicly funded digital resources, paths for companies to be financially sustainable, the role of private investment, and challenges for open innovation in education.

Open Innovation in Education explores how modern society – influenced by the digital revolution and widespread access to information – has often questioned the existing economic model. As opposed to the capitalist economy focused on competition for the sole purpose of profit, the concept of “economy of the common good” is based on collaboration, sharing and plurality. The term “open innovation” was first coined in the early 2000s by Professor Henry Chesbrough at Berkeley. The central idea behind open innovation is that innovation ceases to be something restricted to the private sphere of large corporations. Instead, it should be viewed as an action promoted by the engagement of multiple social actors, transparency and co-creation.

Open education shares common goals with open innovation. It has empowered educators and learners with increased access to knowledge, innovating pedagogical practices, and a culture of sharing. In order for open education to be adopted broadly in public education institutions, there needs to be engagement and dialogue between the State, the private sector, and civil society. To advance this mission, the world’s ministries of education and civil society education leaders recently met at the 2nd World OER Congress in Slovenia with the goal of mainstreaming open education to meet the education targets in the United Nations SDG4. The main output of the Congress – the 2017 Ljubljana OER Action Plan (English / French) called on governments to focus on five areas of action. #4 is “Developing sustainability models” – a call for governments to:

… analyse their goals and needs in education to support the development, adoption, maintenance, distribution, and evaluation of OER. This may include mechanisms to support that work financially and revisiting structures for mainstreaming OER, possibly including adjusting procurement models or the way teachers are incentivised to work on OER. Support and action in particular from governments and educational institutions, is important for the realization of these actions.

The challenge in the case of the private sector is to find viable business models that work with open education. Using reference cases of companies aligned with a collaborative economy, the study presents a viable model to evaluate financial sustainability under a different lens while examining more flexible and customizable products and services that generate value. As a result, more autonomy can be given to teachers when there is a better dialogue between public policies and social business initiatives resulting in innovative results.

This study shows the importance not only of thinking about innovative educational systems but also of considering innovation as something that goes beyond the technological device and that must be constructed in order to empower all actors in the education ecosystem.

Read the report

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We’ve been thinking about the role of Creative Commons in 2017, an era where much of digital sharing culture exists within walled garden platforms, with liking and commenting on insta-photos and sharing playlists that can only be streamed. In other words, the web has changed since CC initially launched in 2001, and we are grappling with what these changes mean for CC tools, originally intended to operate in spaces where download and remix were a given. The web is both open and closed, and CC-licensed content exists in both. In some spaces, like research and education, the value CC brings is still the same; CC tools are used to unlock knowledge and advance discovery and innovation. But what about when it comes to unlocking creativity in music, art, media, and emerging multimedia, such as VR, 3D, and software emulations? What value does CC provide in this changing landscape, and how can CC better provide this value?

We asked artists and researchers at the intersection of technology and social change to provide us with their insights last week at Rhizome, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting digital artists and fostering critical discussion about Internet culture. In a room full of artists, arts organizations, and open culture advocates, our featured speakers were:

• Caroline Sinders, Digital Artist, BuzzFeed/Eyebeam Open Labs Fellow, Anti-harassment researcher at Wikipedia
• Michael Mandiberg, Artist working at the intersection of technology and social change, Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, Co-founder of the Art+Feminism Wikipedia
• Caroline Woolard, Artist and founder of cultural equity platforms BFAMFAPhD.com and StudyCollaboration.com, Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Hartford

We framed the conversation as an opportunity to gather fodder for CC’s next phase of work — CC is building a catalog of the commons and seeking to build services on top of this catalog via an API. As part of this project, we have the opportunity to build in features that simplify attribution, express gratitude, and perhaps most importantly, invite collaboration.

We invite you to provide your own thoughts to us in our Slack community and/or by email. We’ll be hosting additional conversations in 2018. What should those conversations explore and where should they be? Let us know, and read on for a recap of our conversation.

In your experience working with CC licensed media, or more broadly any kind of open content online, what factors have most influenced your participation and contributions?  

Michael made an important (and surprising for us) distinction between his view of what it means to CC license his work and put it out into the world, versus using CC licenses in connection with contributions to a project. In his experience, he had treated these as two very different acts: CC licensing his own work as an individual experience, whereas editing Wikipedia (a CC-licensed project) was a community act. The factors catalyzing creators to CC license a work versus wanting to contribute to a community project are very different in his experience.

• Resulting learning for us: How can we bring these experiences more closely together? How can we make it more apparent that CC licensing a work is also a community act because it is a contribution to the commons?

Caroline S. homed in immediately on the community incentive, responding that what motivates her is the community. For her, the community and how it’s governed factors into why and how she contributes. How welcoming is the community? How is it governed — by a community or by a proprietary platform? How safe do people feel in the space? Is the actual contribution part of an ongoing conversation, e.g. live editing? CC-licensing seems embedded in communities like Wikipedia as almost a political act, as users sign on to share and contribute according to a set of open values.

Caroline W. surfaced an incentive that was both individual and communal, with the community act enhancing the individual experience:

“I work collaboratively because thought happens in real time. I want to be in dialogue at all times with people I think are smart. You want to encounter difference at all times and encounter change slowly. It’s harder to work alone.”

What unexpected behavior or community norms have emerged “in the wild,” in spite of the best laid plans/designs? How have these instances informed your thinking and work going forward?

Caroline S. said one unexpected result of making data sets open was the treating and thinking of data sets as “art,” aka digital communication and literacy bringing in a new phase of data literacy. And then further if the data does not represent certain groups, the consequences of using that data set are multiplied.

Caroline W. agreed, saying, “No tool is better than the people,” and that any tool needs to be facilitated by a group of people in order to use the tool appropriately — and even then, one can’t fully control the results. One example of an unexpected result was the piloting of a barter network under the assumption that the community members would govern themselves as a commons. Ultimately, without any facilitation for the tool in place, members treated the network as a zero-sum game, reinforcing capitalist structures that had no original place in the design. To mitigate this, she believes that up front facilitation and a cultural shift that combines online with offline face-to-face meetings is key.

“No tool is better than the people.”

Michael said the more open and collaborative a project is, the more unexpected the outcomes, especially with the micro-relationships underneath the collaborations. For example, he highlighted the now infamous issue with the American Women Novelists subcategory that relegated women novelists to a different page than the main page featuring male writers.

Caroline S. said one way to mitigate such occurrences is to have a code of conduct, which would help to establish and articulate norms, and also help define bad behavior. Anytime you’re collaborating with people, this should be clearly defined (rather than simply presumed or implied), and it can be flexible, but still provide some sort of structure.

In response to the opportunity for CC generally, the room chimed in with ideas, such as an analog of CC for codes of conduct, e.g. a community license, or some set of standardized rules. Caroline W. suggested conceptualizing art and design as “open access,” where, like Wikipedia, one could fork and debate edits, and version work as a way to involve the community in the work itself.

We closed the night with a question about sustainability, with regards to both the financial and social life of a project.

Michael pointed out that opening up a work inherently makes it sustainable, giving the project a life of its own years later when unintended uses are made of it. For example, a project he developed that involved lampshades for bicycles wasn’t ever adopted by the big manufacturers at the time, but now a derivative is being used on the back of helmets. The important thing is for his version of the project to have been self-sustaining long enough for someone else to take it and build on it.

Caroline S. said that the question for a sustainable community isn’t so much economic as social; it isn’t whether you are saving people money, it is whether you are creating things that make people feel better and want to get involved. She brought us all back to the meta point about our own research and insights into this field of online communities and behavior, and how outside of this event, the day-to-day work of a designer/researcher in this space is challenging because they have no insight into their counterparts’ research and work at commercial platforms. As such, CC gathering researchers and platform representatives together in the same room is valuable in and of itself!

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It’s Open Access Week, the yearly global event to raise broad awareness about the opportunities and benefits for open access to scientific and scholarly research. Open Access Week—now in its 10th year—also mobilises action for progressive policy changes so that researchers and the public get immediate online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and reuse those results.

This year’s theme is “Open In Order To…”—an invitation to answer the question of what concrete benefits can be realized by making scholarly outputs openly available.

Today we’re wrapping up another inspiring Open Access Week. We’ve talked about a variety of issues, including the continued adoption of open access policies that require CC licensing in order to maximize reuse potential, the moral imperative to reform copyright so students aren’t prosecuted for sharing knowledge, the massive potential for preprints to accelerate research and scientific discovery, and the importance of improving access to the laws, regulations, and standards that uphold democratic societies.

Support our efforts for Open Access – sign up!

In April 2016, I wrote the following in WIRED:

I get inspired when I think about what we’d be capable of if we agree to work together without restriction. This is humanity at its most powerful.

Since I wrote that piece, CC’s international community has surged ahead as a worldwide network of advocates through our Global Network Strategy. We’ve launched the CC Certificates Beta, which will teach hundreds of librarians, educators, and more how to become expert advocates and practitioners for open licensing. We joined the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative at the White House, released a crucial new tool for authors to reclaim their rights, and collaborated with other leading organizations in the open movement, such as Wikimedia, Mozilla, Fundación Karisma, Communia Association, Authors Alliance, and SPARC (the organizers of OA Week).

At the center of our work, we always ask: How can we help global communities come together in service of collective goals? How do we unlock creativity and knowledge as public resources that everyone can use to advance the common good? How do we embed collaboration, inclusion, and equity into our approach?

If it wasn’t so well-established, the traditional model of academic publishing would be considered scandalous. Billions in research funding is provided by governments, foundations, and institutions to advance the public welfare, researchers and editors submit their work for free to journals, and still much of it is still locked behind paywalls. Much of the entrenched academic publishing system continues to withhold crucial access from the general public through embargos, paywalls, and excessive “processing fees” for open access licenses.

The moral case for open access is strong—scholarly publishing is going to have to change, and some of the most needed updates are already on the way—but I’m hopeful that publishers and the structures of academia that entrench their influence will pick up the pace. Some forward looking publishers are seeking new models, while a few holdouts are hanging on to lap up the last drops before the tap is turned off. Those who adapt and move with this rising tide can be tomorrow’s leaders. Those who don’t? Well, no one really misses Kodak.

Before I met with former VP Joe Biden’s team at the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, we asked community members to tell us what open access for cancer research would mean to them. I expected to hear from doctors and patients. What shocked me was how many parents, husbands, wives, and children I heard from, who are desperately seeking knowledge to help their loved ones who are sick. We shared some of their stories on Medium last year, and they remain a moving reminder as to why I do this work, why I lead Creative Commons in this question of access, the basis of which is a fundamental human right to know.

There is simply no moral case that justifies withholding access to knowledge that could advance discovery or alleviate suffering, especially when the public paid for it in the first place. The World Health Organization recognized the power of openness to create faster vaccines when it called for research sharing as Zika affected mothers and their newborn babies. But why not for all research done in the public interest? Nearly everyone has utilized the power of the internet to research an issue close to them—to learn more about their health or the health of a loved one, to prepare for a job interview, to receive and share news, or simply to learn something cool. There is amazing research happening all over the world—unlocking it is more than simply an issue of access, it is one of equality and human rights.

Movements have to be guided by their values, and while all too often, it becomes “us-versus-them”, sometimes it’s clear that change will require disruption, and the end of old empires. Creative Commons and other open access groups champion the “free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.” I’ll work with anyone who steps forward to achieve this goal, but like the looming end of big oil, it’s only a matter of time until change arrives. The question is how long we will allow these old models to continue before we force new systems to come into the mainstream? Perhaps our greatest living physicist, Stephen Hawking, released his PhD thesis under open access just last Sunday, saying, “Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding.”

At the Mozilla Festival this weekend, I’m going to be speaking with my colleagues and friends Katherine Maher from Wikimedia and Mark Surman from Mozilla about specific areas where we can work better together in service of our common goals. But we can’t do it without you — our power is collective. We need you to join the movement, whether with us and with our allies to collaborate for impact.

I’m amazed at what this big, open movement has already achieved together. This year, the CC Global Network has been instrumental in supporting Diego Gómez, the Colombian student facing up to 8 years of jail time for sharing a single paper online, we have been a strong voice for copyright reform in the European Union, and we have taken on sweeping issues like NAFTA and an expansion of the public domain. The work of open access needs to keep in clear view the ultimate goals of science and scholarship — a fundamental search for knowledge — that is now supercharged for sharing and collaboration to solve the world’s toughest scientific and social problems. I can’t wait to realize these goals together with you.

The post Open In Order To…Fulfill Our Vision for Universal Access to Research and Education appeared first on Creative Commons.

It’s Open Access Week, the yearly global event to raise broad awareness about the opportunities and benefits for open access to scientific and scholarly research. Open Access Week—now in its 10th year—also mobilises action for progressive policy changes so that researchers and the public get immediate online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and reuse those results.

This year’s theme is “Open In Order To…”—an invitation to answer the question of what concrete benefits can be realized by making scholarly outputs openly available.

Support our efforts for Open Access – sign up!

In addition to advocating for open access to scientific research, we should also recognize the necessity for improving access to the laws, regulations, and standards that govern our societies and impact our lives everyday.

There are several organisations working in this crucial area of open access. In March we highlighted the work of the Free Law Project, an initiative “to provide free, public, and permanent access to primary legal materials on the Internet for educational, charitable, and scientific purposes to the benefit of the general public and the public interest.”

Public information advocate Carl Malamud has been fighting for years to make sure that the public has access to the law. His project Public.Resource.Org focuses on digitizing and making accessible the works of the U.S. Federal Government, which by statute are mostly in the public domain. But Carl has received some staunch opposition to his work, particularly around the publishing of technical standards. Oftentimes these standards are created by private entities and then “incorporated by reference” into various public laws, such as fire codes. Malamud was sued by standards bodies for copyright infringement because he posted the standards online.

Carl has also been actively challenging state-level rules that forbid the open publishing of the legal code. A few years ago he purchased a hard copy of the Georgia legal code, digitized it, and published it online. In response, the state of Georgia sent a cease and desist to Malamud and an initial court ruling has sided with Georgia claiming that Malamud’s action infringed on the exclusive copyright of the state of Georgia. They sent a cease and desist to Malamud and Public.Resource.Org is appealing the ruling.

Another longstanding impediment to open access to court case information is the PACER database. PACER stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records; the website is an electronic public access service of United States federal court documents. PACER is a strange, antiquated, and to some, absurd website, charging users a fee of $0.10 for every document downloaded from its site. All of these materials are documents of public record as a part of the U.S. court system.

RECAP (“PACER” spelled backwards) is a clever browser plugin developed at Princeton in 2009 that captures documents that have already been accessed by a paying customer and displays them for free to subsequent searchers. However, there have also been a few class action court cases brought against the U.S. Government claiming that the PACER database fails to provide users with free access to judicial opinions, thus in violation of the E-Government Act of 2002. In a recent case, D’Apuzzo v. United States of America (Civil Action No. 16-62769-Civ-Scola), a District Court judge denied the government’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

Follow along with the Creative Commons blog, Twitter, and Facebook this week, and be sure to tag and share your posts with the #OAweek hashtag.

 

The post Open In Order To…Guarantee Access to the Laws That Govern Us appeared first on Creative Commons.

It’s Open Access Week, the yearly global event to raise broad awareness about the opportunities and benefits for open access to scientific and scholarly research. Open Access Week—now in its 10th year—also mobilises action for progressive policy changes so that researchers and the public get immediate online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and reuse those results.

This year’s theme is “Open In Order To…”—an invitation to answer the question of what concrete benefits can be realized by making scholarly outputs openly available.

Support our efforts for Open Access – sign up!

Yesterday we hosted group discussion via Slack chat on the timely topic of preprints—an important and growing practice within scholarly communication with major implications for open access publishing. You can view the full chat history in the #cc-openaccess channel on the Creative Commons Slack. We are especially interested in how preprint servers are handling the issue of open licensing.

Generally speaking, a preprint is a version of a manuscript that’s made available before peer-review and publication, distributed to receive early feedback. The discussions around preprints can be quite complex and vary between communities of practice. Preprints are important because they are a mechanism for collaboration and could even speed up the process of research. As we learned during the Slack chat, apparently citations of preprints date back to at least 1922!

In the chat, we asked how universities view preprints from a tenure and promotion standpoint. Do researchers get recognized for sharing work earlier as preprints? We know that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is permitting researchers to submit preprints and draft research in asking for funding, and recommending the use of CC licensing to share such materials, where appropriate. There are some universities that are taking into account the sharing of preprints in their hiring and promotion policies. And even though many institutions do not yet formally recognize preprints as contributing to their tenure review process, ASAPbio is tracking stories that indicate that sharing preprints can help land a job.

We discussed how preprints approach open licensing. Do they allow it? Encourage it? Require it? What sorts of things do you think preprint authors should know about Creative Commons licensing? For the most part, it seems that CC licensed preprints work within the existing scholarly publishing system. There are some projects to track the preprint policies of academic journals. Initially there was concern that commercial journals would refuse to publish an article if its preprint had been previously shared under a CC license, and some commercial publishers do not allow it (or make it very difficult to do). But apparently publishers like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) have subsequently changed course—pulling back on their restrictive policy and permitting the publishing of preprints shared under CC licenses.

Participants in the chat agreed that preprints should allow (but not necessarily require) Creative Commons licensing, and that the author should choose what they do with their work as the copyright holder. We were also pointed to an interesting blog post on the topic of author licensing choices in preprints.

We also talked about the potential for preprints to share other types of information outside of relatively advanced research papers. For example, data sets, research notes, and even code could be shared under the preprint model. One question pertinent to the sharing of these other types of content is the appropriate open license for doing so. For example, software should be shared as free and open-source software, not under a CC license.

Finally, we wondered what the future holds for preprints within the scholarly publishing ecosystem. In a recent interview, biologist and PLOS co-founder Mike Eisen said:

The most important thing to do now is to get publishers – commercial and non-profit – out of the process. The whole industry is unnecessary and needlessly cumbersome and expensive. We should all just publish in places like bioRxiv (assuming its software gets better and produces finished documents people are happy to read) and do all peer review post publication. There should be little or no money transacted in the process – the infrastructure should be subsidized so it’s free to both publish and access all the content.

The question is, are preprints the logical conclusion to this because they accelerate scientific research without the added baggage and cost of the scholarly publishing system? Some people agreed that the value that publishers bring is in the facilitation of peer review, curation of resources–not just making content available. Essentially, that publishing will become even moreso a service model across the publishing life cycle, and thus less of a tool that grants access (or restricts it). But of course, there are a lot of things that need to be addressed in concert, including the ongoing reliance of the scientific community on power branding of “high impact” journals, and also the challenges of academic promotion.

Follow along with the Creative Commons blog, Twitter, and Facebook this week, and be sure to tag and share your posts with the #OAweek hashtag.

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