Unless you’ve been avoiding the internet entirely, you’ve probably heard about people buying and selling non-fungible tokens — or NFTs — unique data tokens that link to digital files, including artworks and other types of copyrightable works.

CC has been following how people are creating and trading NFTs, and how the marketplace of creative works is transforming. We keep seeing NFTs linked to works published with CC’s open licenses or the CC0 public domain dedication — so often that CC0 NFTs have their own hashtag: #cc0summer. We know that there are many in the CC community trying to figure out how CC tools interact with NFTs — as are many others who are hearing about CC for the first time as they explore NFTs.

While we always welcome contributions to the public commons, we want to ensure everyone understands how these new tools and practices might align with our legal tools and the global open commons that CC legal tools enable. Having spoken with some NFT artists and platform team members, we know there is widespread misunderstanding about what a CC license or CC0 dedication means. When a CC license or CC0 is used to share a work, the rights to reuse that work are widely or completely shared, with limited or no rights reserved.

To help clarify how NFTs are already leveraging CC legal tools, we have added a new section to our FAQ on using CC licenses and the CC0 public domain dedication with NFTs. This FAQ is intended to provide basic guidance for those who are already using NFTs and want to know how to use CC licenses and legal tools with NFT projects. We will continue to update our FAQ as our understanding and interpretation develops.

CC’s licenses and legal tools are intentionally general-purpose: we designed them to be applicable to a wide variety of contexts and works. While some may believe NFTs are a special case that call for new copyright licenses, we believe CC licenses and CC0 work well to contribute works to the public commons when used with NFTs. NFTs may introduce new relationships around who holds the rights to related works and how such rights are transferred as NFTs change hands, but those are contractual questions best handled outside open licenses or a release to the public domain.

If your creative work is linked to an NFT, you may apply one of the existing CC licenses or CC0 to let others know how they may share and reuse your work, separate from the ownership of a related token. And where this is used with intention, there are many possibilities for vibrant sharing and reuse where these works are in the public commons, with the ownership of the rights completely removed from the ownership of the token.

We are aware of other efforts in the space, including some that say they are inspired by CC’s work but are incompatible with the material already available in the commons. (In particular, some of the licenses recently produced by a16z, which claim direct inspiration but were not developed in consultation with CC.) While the approach may be similar, the effect is different: the terms of most of these licenses are incompatible with the CC licenses and with most other free and open content licenses; users of these terms will find that their works are remixable only within the narrow space of others using the same terms, rather than the much broader spectrum of works using the CC licenses and compatible licenses. This is not true of all other licensing efforts: some simply add terms about the sale and transfer of the token as an addition to a CC license or public domain release.

NFTs, and the distributed web movement they are a part of, are new and still evolving. NFTs are also hotly debated. We know many in the CC community embrace NFTs as a new way to support and enable creators. Many others offer strong and convincing criticism. Whatever your opinions about NFTs, CC licenses and the CC0 dedication are being used widely in conjunction with NFTs and works they reference. CC has a responsibility to our mission and our community to clarify how our work connects to these emerging tools and practices. At CC we are watching closely, focused on how NFTs may help or hinder better sharing: sharing that is inclusive, just and equitable — where everyone has wide opportunity to access content, to contribute their own creativity, and to receive recognition and rewards for their contributions.

Please read and share the more detailed discussion in our FAQ.

The post New FAQ on NFTs and CC0 appeared first on Creative Commons.

Hi Creative Commoners! We are back with a new episode of CC’s Open Minds … from Creative Commons podcast. In this month’s episode of the show, Jennryn Wetzler, CC’s Director of Learning and Training, talks all things Open Education and Inclusive Access Textbooks with Trudi Radtke, former Open Education Project Manager at SPARC.

InclusiveAccess.org is a community-driven initiative that launched in 2021 to raise awareness of the facts about automatic textbook billing. The initiative was developed by SPARC with generous support from the Michelson 20MM Foundation, and Creative Commons is one of the partners. 

This episode was recorded in June 2022, when Trudi Radtke was the Open Education Project Manager at SPARC. In this role, they spearheaded advocacy and implementation for initiatives to make education more open and equitable, including InclusiveAccess.org. Prior to working at SPARC, Trudi was an Education Technology Specialist, OER Specialist and open consultant in the California community college system. As an Open and OER consultant, they have assisted in the creation of over 120 open textbooks and several Z-Degree pathways. Trudi is passionate about Open and has advocated for OER at the state, regional, and international levels.

• 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: Trudi Radtke on InclusiveAccess.org appeared first on Creative Commons.

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.