In honor of Creative Commons’ tenth anniversary, we’re profiling several media platforms with CC integration. Vimeo has supported CC licensing since 2010, and has accumulated over two million CC-licensed videos. When I spoke with VP of creative development Blake Whitman, he told me that Vimeo’s staff and community had been talking about CC for years prior. “We knew that this would be perfect for the type of community that Vimeo has. There’s a lot of remixing going on, and it made a lot of sense for us to incorporate it. We thought it was a great web standard that needed to be solidified in our space.”

I also asked Blake to recommend some of his favorite CC-licensed videos on Vimeo. Two of those are embedded in this interview; the rest are listed below.

Tell me more about how CC licensing fits into the Vimeo community.

The beginnings of Vimeo were really about sharing and collaboration, doing projects together, and sharing life’s moments. It’s evolved over time – as we added HD and other featured that attract higher-end creators – but that ethos has always stayed the same. We’ve always given users the option to make their vidoes available for download. It’s important that when people make their content available for download, there’s a clear way for the creator to indicate how they’d like that content to be used.

For a long time, we didn’t have that. You could make it explicit in the description that there was a CC license on it, but since it wasn’t built into Vimeo, it wasn’t being used consistently. When people download videos, they should know what the rights are that the creators are intending.

The Mountain from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

How much did you publicize the CC implementation? Were there any hiccups or pushback from the community?

There’s always a period of learning for anything new, but we work very hard to make it clear. It’s crucial that people understand how the licenses work – and not just for videos. I want users to understand CC licensing on a deeper level, as a part of sharing on the Internet at large.

Do you think that Creative Commons has changed the Vimeo community’s attitudes about sharing?

It’s always changing and evolving, as smaller communities within Vimeo expand and contract and branch out.

People are open willing to share, and CC is a model that makes sense. Look how many people are allowing their content to be used for commercial purposes. And that’s pretty amazing, that people are that open to allow for people to make money from the stuff that they create, as long as they’re cited. That’s great, and I think it’s really important.

Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Blake’s favorite CC-licensed videos on Vimeo:

• The Mountain
• Murmuration
• Marcel The Shell With Shoes On
• Jellyfish Lake
• Sense of Flying
• A Story for Tomorrow
• Grand Finale
• Everything is a Remix
• I Look I Move
• Right Here All Over (Occupy Wall St)
• Beat
• Phoenix – A Take Away Show

cc10 / Webbstjärnan.SE / CC BY

Welcome to Day 3 of #cc10. Today, Commoners are celebrating in Mexico City and Jakarta, and here on the Creative Commons blog, we’re celebrating Creative Commons in science.

In his guest blog post, John Wilbanks applauds sharing where you might not expect it, explaining how the world’s largest pharmaceutical company used open data sharing to make a huge step in malaria research.

Today’s featured platform is the Public Library of Science (PLOS). PLOS CEO Peter Jerram explains how open licensing is key to the sharing and development of scientific knowledge.

Finally, a trip to the origins of CC and an amazing example of the possibilities of international sharing: it’s the Kazakh translation of Larry Lessig’s Free Culture.

Throughout the #cc10 celebrations, we’re profiling online platforms with Creative Commons integration. Today, Public Library of Science (PLOS) CEO Peter Jerram discusses the role that PLOS and Creative Commons play in the open access movement.

Shared Facts and Open Access: A PLOS Salute to Creative Commons

By Peter Jerram

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” This quote, attributed to the late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is usually applied in the political arena as a warning to partisans about allowing ideology to trump more objective, quantitative realities – things like a country’s GNP, its unemployment rate or balance of trade. Without a foundation for dialogue built on the same basic facts, self-governance falters, he warned.

Moynihan’s core idea works equally well to describe the realities facing those of us involved in scientific discovery and publishing where the sheer size of today’s biomedical and environmental challenges makes collaborative research based on a shared set of facts an absolute necessity. Indeed it is not enough to just share those facts, we must be also able to share, and collaborate over ideas, claims, and arguments, for science to function effectively.

Roughly a decade ago, the founders of PLOS, Pat Brown, Harold Varmus, and Michael Eisen, recognized the importance of unrestricted and immediate access to the scholarly record in biology, medicine and related fields. That’s why, from the onset of its publishing efforts, PLOS applied the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) to all its articles. Under this license, authors retain ownership of copyright, and allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and copy the content as long as the original authors and sources are cited. No permission is required from the authors or from PLOS for subsequent researchers to take these findings, add a novel element, and move to the next critical stage of discovery. CC BY is a revolutionary legal tool that continues to enable the Open Access movement to accelerate scientific discovery on every continent. This rapid growth is reflected by the fact that PLOS ONE is now the world’s largest online journal.

We believe that this movement from limited access to an era of open science, fueled by the exponential growth of the internet, has as great a potential for advancing the tools and capabilities of our research as did the determination of the structure of the DNA molecule by Francis Crick and James D. Watson in 1953. Indeed, without openness and data sharing across public and private sector labs and national borders, there would have been no Human Genome Project.

The advent of Open Access set the stage for the development of new methods for designing clinical trials and advancing personalized medicine through endeavors such as the European Union co-funded ACGT (Advancing Clinico-Genomic Clinical Trials on Cancer). In 2010, this consortium completed its creation of an open source translational data infrastructure documenting clinical trials for cancer for the benefit of both oncologists and cancer researchers. Among other advances, the ACGT knowledge grid assisted in bringing about major progress toward a cure for a pediatric cancer of the kidneys known as nephroblastoma.

In the US, another exciting Open Access biomedical research model exists in Cancer Commons, founded by Marty Tenenbaum (a PLOS Board Member) with the aim “to engage cancer researchers, patients, and physician in order to reduce delays in getting promising investigational drugs into the clinic and knowledge back to the patients.” A recent Cancer Commons project led to the determination of four molecular subtypes in lung cancer tumor cells. Working with shared data and clinical methodologies, researchers correlated these subtypes with different genetic aberrations and drugs that may potentially treat them. The resulting research paper, A Novel Classification of Lung Cancer into Molecular Subtypes, was published in PLOS ONE in 2012.

The work of Creative Commons ensures that these projects can use the papers we publish without requiring the additional time and cost that asking special permissions would require. It ensures that translators and educators know they are free to use the research we publish and it allows Wikipedia editors to enrich this critical reference work with text and resources from the research literature. On the occasion of its 10th anniversary, PLOS salutes Creative Commons for its pioneering work in establishing the legal and technological tools that enable Open Access science publishing to flourish.

Peter Jerram is the CEO of PLOS.

In celebration of Creative Commons’ tenth anniversary, we asked various friends of CC to write about the role that open licensing plays in their fields. Today, John Wilbanks shows how the world’s largest pharmaceutical company made a big step in malaria research by sharing its data openly.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is perhaps not the first name most think of when they think of Creative Commons. Large pharmaceutical companies aren’t always the avant-garde commoners.

Yet in 2010, GSK made an amazing move. They took a set of 13,500 chemicals that their internal screens had shown to be active against malaria and put them in the public domain under CC0. They also made sure the data were technically available by depositing the set at a government data repository.

This isn’t how it’s usually done in the pharmaceutical industry, needless to say.

But something beautiful has happened in the intervening years. Something that is totally natural to those of us who live and breathe the commons, something mindboggling to those who don’t.

The data are being used to try to find a cure for malaria. By people who would otherwise be locked out of the process. A nonprofit foundation invested in a lab to take some of the compounds forward for investigation. They’re working together in an open lab notebook. And now 400 of the best candidate drugs are available as a “malaria box” that anyone can request to work on their optimization.

It’s still a long way from a cure for malaria. Drug discovery is hard, mainly because we don’t understand biology well enough to predict what’s going to happen with most compounds when we put them into practice. Our bodies are too complicated for the businesses trying to cure them.

But this is a methodological revolution: deploying the commons as an organizational structure to deal with that complexity. And it was driven, in the beginning, by the moment that the world’s largest pharmaceutical company became a commoner.

Compounds of Interest in Update / Matthew Todd / CC BY-SA

John Wilbanks currently runs the Consent to Research project (CtR), a massive clinical research study in which people take the data they can gather about their own health and donate it for computational analysis. Mr. Wilbanks is also one of the founders of the Access2Research petition. As part of CtR, Mr. Wilbanks is a Senior Fellow in Entrepreneurship at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a Research Fellow at Lybba, and supported by Sage Bionetworks. Mr. Wilbanks has worked at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the World Wide Web Consortium, the US House of Representatives, and most recently Creative Commons. Mr. Wilbanks also started a bioinformatics company called Incellico, which is now part of Selventa.

On day 2 of CC10 we focus on what makes CC more than just a bunch of licenses – our community.

We give a long over-due introduction to Creative Commons for those who haven’t met us yet, with a favorite resource from one of our global volunteer affiliates: CC Qatar presents Meet Creative Commons. At the same time, we discuss CC’s geek-cred with Josh Wattles, adviser to one of our oldest artist communities – deviantART – and we examine how a simple licensing decision can create community around a work, with Gautam John of Pratham Books.

Most importantly, today we get our CC10 community parties started. Not 1, not 2, but 3 separate birthday events are happening around the world tonight. CC Berlin brings us keynotes, talks, interviews and a DJ, in a party themed around the success and impact CC has built over the past 10 years. Meanwhile CC Belgium is rebooting itself with a showcase of Creative Commons artists and projects. And finally, CC Headquarters has its own party in San Francisco, where CC staff, Board and community members will participate in interactive exhibits, live remixing (brought to you by Global Lives and Dublab) and general good-cheer. We’ll have a tweet wall at the event – so if you want to be part of it, just tweet us your birthday wishes after 5pm San Francisco time tonight.