As we prepare for the December board meeting, I’d like to reflect on Creative Commons’ biennial Global Summit in Buenos Aires last August and report on developments in Cathy Casserly’s transition as CEO.

It was inspiring to be among the several hundred who gathered in Argentina, meeting with the global affiliate network, CC staff, and our allies in the open movement. We had several days of substantive interactions with representatives from over 80 countries, enriched by our diverse cultures, language, and experiences.

CC’s board of directors held its summer meeting during the summit. Our agenda focused on our strategic priorities, license version 4.0, copyright reform, and upcoming shifts within the board and organization.

• Cathy Casserly summarized accomplishments in CC priority and identified key challenges that remain.
• Board member Michael Carroll provided an overview of the 4.0 license suite, now poised for launch this month.
• We held a preliminary discussion of the copyright reform policy statement developed by the CC community to support copyright reform efforts around the world, and approved it at the next Board meeting, in October.
• We discussed candidates nominated by the community to join the CC Board of Directors and newly formed Advisory Council. Stellar recommendations emerged from the open call process, and I look forward to announcing the names of our new governance leadership after our December board meeting.

Copyright Reform

From the earliest days of Creative Commons, there has been ongoing discussion about the degree to which it is appropriate for the organization to engage in the copyright reform debate. While the organization’s mission has always been to help creators share their knowledge and creativity with the world, our licenses are necessarily embedded in and adjunct to copyright law. Moreover, many of CC’s affiliates are leaders of the copyright reform movements in their respective countries.

Those discussions culminated at the summit, when affiliates held a special pre-summit conference to discuss Creative Commons’ role in the copyright reform debate. The event was the one of the best-attended sessions of the entire summit, with over 100 individuals representing both the Affiliate Network and the broader community.

Participants collectively drafted a statement that acknowledges the need for improvements in copyright law worldwide. The board formally endorsed the statement in October. The statement won’t be surprising or controversial to people who’ve been following CC for very long. What it will do is clarify that as an organization, we don’t see open licensing as the only solution to every problem with copyright law.

For a longer explanation of the context around this issue and what it means for the organization, see the blog post about it.

CEO Transition: The Search Begins

The last part of our meeting in Buenos Aires focused on Cathy’s plans to transition from her role as CEO in early 2014, after three years of service. Cathy has been a tremendous strategic leader for the organization, and with the focus she has brought to CC’s mission and priorities, we are substantially closer to achieving our vision than ever before.

To ensure a wide and thorough search for our next CEO, the Board of Directors has engaged m/Oppenheim to lead our search process. The search committee has now been formed; we expect to launch the search publicly in the near future, and look forward to community input. Please send any ideas about candidates to Lisa Grossman, lisag@moppenheim.com.

As the Creative Commons leadership changes, its mission remains constant, and I am continually heartened by the memory of the summit which confirmed that the global community’s commitment to our movement — to a more open internet and world — are stronger than ever.

Best wishes,
Paul

Creative Commons is looking to hire a part-time contractor to assist the CC Global Network team with organizational planning, strategic communications, community building, and fundraising in the Arab World. The focus of the position in 2014 will include supporting local affiliates, conducting outreach to new communities, and coordinating collaborative projects. Candidates should be based in the Middle East region, and the position will require international travel. Candidates should be able to communicate in Arabic and English.

This is a great opportunity for a knowledgeable and motivated free culture advocate or community organizer. Please follow the instructions on the CC website if you’d like to apply.

The structure of human proteins defines, in part, what it is to be human. It is very expensive, as much as a couple of million USD, to determine the structure of human membrane proteins. Improvements in methods, computers and access to the complete sequence of our DNA, however, has made it possible to adopt more systematic approaches, and thus reduce the time and cost to determine the shapes of proteins. Structural genomics helps determine the 3D structures of proteins at a rapid rate and in a cost-effective manner. Structural information provides one of the most powerful means to discover how proteins work and to define ligands that modulate their function. Such ligands are starting points for drug discovery.

The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) at the Universities of Oxford and Toronto, solves the structures of human proteins of medical relevance and places all its findings, reagents and know-how into the public domain without restriction. Using these structures and the reagents generated as part of the structure determination process as well as the chemical probes identified, the SGC works with organizations across the world to further the understanding of the biological roles of these proteins. The SGC is particularly interested in human protein kinases, metabolism-associated proteins, integral membrane proteins, and proteins associated with epigenetics and rare diseases.

Drug discovery tends to be a crapshoot. As we are not good at target validation that essentially occurs in patients, more than 90% of the pioneer targets fail in Phase 2. Nevertheless, many academics and pharmas work on the same, small group of targets in competition with each other, wasting resources and careers, needlessly exposing patients to molecules destined for failure. The SGC chooses not to work under the lamp post, focusing on those targets for which there is little or no literature. This is because it is such pioneer targets, which will deliver pioneer, breakthrough medicines.

The SGC is a not-for-profit, public-private partnership, funded by public and charitable funders in Canada and UK, and eight large pharmaceutical companies – GSK, Pfizer, Novartis, Lilly, Boehringer Ingelheim, Janssen, Takeda and Abbvie, whose mandate is to promote the development of new medicines by determining 3D structures on a large scale and cost-effectively, targeting human proteins of biomedical importance and proteins from human parasites that represent potential drug targets.

The SGC is now responsible for between a quarter and half of all structures deposited into the Protein Data Bank (PDB) each year. The SGC has released the structures of nearly 1500 proteins with implications to the development of new therapies for cancer, diabetes, obesity, and psychiatric disorders. As evident from the chart, SGC has published as many protein kinases as the rest of academia combined.

The SGC’s structural biology insights have allowed us to make significant progress toward the understanding of signal transduction, epigenetics and chromatin biology, and metabolic disease. The SGC has adopted the following Open Access policy—the SGC and its scientists are committed to making their research outputs (materials and knowledge) available without restriction on use. This means that the SGC promptly places its results in the public domain and agrees to not file for patent protection on any of its research outputs. This not only provides the public with this fundamental knowledge, but also allows commercial efforts and other academics to utilize the data freely and without any delay. The SGC seeks the same commitment from any research collaborator. The structural information is made available to everyone either when the structure is released by the PDB, or pre-released on www.thesgc.org.

Prof. Chas Bountra at the University of Oxford says:

“Society desperately needs new treatments for many chronic (AD, bipolar disorder, pain…) or rare diseases. This need is growing because of aging societies and diseases of modern living. As a biomedical community, we have yet to deliver truly novel treatments for many such conditions. This is not for lack of effort or resources. It is simply that these disorders are complex and there are too many variables or unknowns. It is clear that no one group or organisation can do this on their own. What we are trying to do is to bring together the best scientists from across the world, irrespective of affiliation, pooling resources and infrastructures, reducing wasteful duplicative activity to catalyse the creation of new medicines for patients. Secrecy and competition in early phases of target identification/discovery are slowing down drug discovery, making the process more difficult and more expensive.”

We at CC applaud the SGC’s commitment to open access and look to them for leadership in this arena. We believe the SGC’s findings would be a great candidate for the CC0 Public Domain Dedication because of the CC0 mark’s global recognition and a common legal status.

Today marks the launch of the Open Access Button, a browser bookmark tool that allows users to report when they hit paywalled access to academic articles and discover open access versions of that research. The button was created by university students David Carroll and Joseph McArthur, and announced at the Berlin 11 Student and Early Stage Researcher Satellite Conference.

From the press release:

The Open Access Button is a browser-based tool that lets users track when they are denied access to research, then search for alternative access to the article. Each time a user encounters a paywall, he simply clicks the button in his bookmark bar, fills out an optional dialogue box, and his experience is added to a map alongside other users. Then, the user receives a link to search for free access to the article using resources such as Google Scholar. The Open Access Button initiative hopes to create a worldwide map showing the impact of denied access to research.

The creators have also indicated that they plan to release the data collected by the Open Access Button under CC0. Congratulations on the release of this useful tool.

I’m excited to be speaking tomorrow with the young journalists at the National High School Journalism Convention. A few months ago, Creative Commons had a table at a similar convention in San Francisco. When we saw the enthusiasm that the students there had about open licensing, we decided to start planning a session about Creative Commons for young journalists.

Whenever I’m talking with high schoolers about Creative Commons, one thing always strikes me. They get it. Today’s young content creators don’t dream of spending 40 years working for a single publisher or media company. They’re preparing to piece careers together working on projects for lots of clients with lots of different business models; therefore, they intuitively know the value of using open licensing to get their work out to as wide an audience as possible. Or as Cathy put it, “The creators who are thriving today are the ones who use internet distribution most innovatively; in fact, the ones who are most generous with their work often reap the most reward.”

I’m hoping to use this session to meet some people at school journalism programs who’d like to experiment with ramping up their sharing. What if your school newspaper went 100% CC for a year? Where would the content get republished? How would it impact your staff’s résumés? Interested? Let’s talk.

Here are my slides for the session (see the speaker notes for more information and links):

Download as PDF (2.6 MB)

And some links for more information:

• Six licenses for sharing your work (45 KB PDF): Nice, simple introduction to Creative Commons.
• ProPublica: Investigative journalism organization that licenses all of its content under CC.
• Jonathan Worth’s connected classroom: Jonathan is a well-known British portrait photographer who’s been licensing his photos under CC for years.
• Creative Commons in journalism