Thousands of strangers working together, almost entirely online, to effectively solve an urgent, global challenge is remarkable—and it’s happening, right now. Recently, we published a post titled, “Open-Source Medical Hardware: What You Should Know and What You Can Do” examining the collaborative efforts by volunteer groups, universities, and research centers to solve the medical supply shortage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic through open-source medical hardware. While researching that story, we stumbled on the work of Just One Giant Lab (JOGL). 

JOGL is a research and innovation laboratory based in Paris, France that operates as an open and distributed mobilization platform for collaborative task solving. When the pandemic started, JOGL’s team recognized that their knowledge of community organizing and their open platform could help create and support many open-source projects. In response, they launched the OpenCovid19 Initiative, which now includes over 4000 healthcare workers, engineers, designers, scientists, technologists, and everyday citizens. The vibrant, global community exchanges thousands of daily messages on hundreds of projects they hope will help save lives; from an open-source syringe to an algorithm that calculates the probability of infection. 

To get a better understanding of JOGL’s mission, its community, and open source work, we reached out to Co-Founder and CTO Leo Blondel via email.

Our interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

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Q: What’s Just One Giant Lab’s (JOGL) mission? 

Blondel: Our mission from the beginning has been to become the first full-fledged virtual laboratory where users can collaborate and innovate in order to solve problems and answer research questions—we want to be a central hub for open science and innovation. On the social side, we aim to help humanity fix its most urgent and important problems using open science, responsible innovation, and continuous learning. To that end, we partner with academic labs, companies, startups, foundations, NGOs, and public services to create participatory research programs for understanding and solving health, environmental, social, and humanitarian issues. On the technical side, we create and utilize a series of open-source applications to support the research and innovation activities generated by our users. To this aim, we have created a platform where users can launch their projects and collaborate openly with others to solve pressing needs.

Q: What are some initiatives JOGL is working on in regards to the medical supply shortage? 

Blondel: Currently, multiple initiatives are being developed. We quickly identified that many factories, maker spaces, and citizens had a production capacity that could be put to use. Due to the beauty of open-source projects, the number of available prototypes was staggering—over 70 designs for open masks, for example. Therefore a project was created to review, test, and select the designs that were the most relevant, safe, compliant, and easily manufactured by a panel of medical experts. Armed with this idea, we created a partnership with the Paris Hospital Network (APHP) to organize a validation challenge and identified four essential needs: face masks and face shields, syringe pumps, consumables for intubation, and ventilators. So far, the Open-Source Syringe Pump project has been selected, and a team composed of medical doctors, engineers, and manufacturers are working to get the device refined with a foolproof user experience (UX) design and fail proof delivery system. Finally, a long-running open-source respirator project is currently in the testing phase to prove that the design is applicable in a medical setting.  

Q: How is JOGL working across its entire community to help fill the medical supply shortage? 

Blondel: JOGL acts as the central hub that connects citizens, amateurs, medical doctors, researchers, and policymakers. By creating a central repository of knowledge where people can not only document, but also discuss, and collaborate on open research and innovation we accelerate what would normally require established professional networks. An example is the aforementioned Open-Source Syringe Pump project, where JOGL connected the knowhow of the medical doctors at the Paris Hospital Network to engineers in the United States and manufacturers in China. JOGL not only provides the technical tools necessary for this to happen, but also the coordination team necessary to establish relationships between humans and ideas. 

We are also creating and implementing a new open governance scheme so that communities can self organize more easily. For this, we are working with wonderful community members who specialize in management, sociocracy, holacracy, and other new and exciting forms of open governance. We hope that this beta test will help us establish new and clear guidelines and models to create better UX and user flows in order to fast track similar collaborations in the future.

Q: Have you been surprised at the willingness of your community to volunteer their time and resources to help with these initiatives? 

Blondel: I was not surprised. From a historical perspective, times of crisis have more often than not created enormous solidarity movements. Most recently, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico saw the regeneration of community links long lost. People flying back to help and thousands of people rebuilding infrastructure for free—a great read on this would be Naomi Klein’s The Battle For Paradise. As an evolutionary biologist, I think that because we have evolved to be a social species and have empathy, it’s hard for us to stand inactive when we see misery. So I wasn’t surprised that people organized to help. Open communities are the foundational structure of JOGL, and we have always believed in their power to change the world. What did surprise us was the willingness of large institutions to trust initiatives like ours in a time of crisis and to try to establish partnerships with us to strengthen the community effort. We are now seeing a shift in how large actors are seeing open initiatives and I believe it’s for the best! 

Q: What impact do you think the COVID-19 pandemic will have on open source and open science?

Blondel: I think that this pandemic happened at a time where open communities were “ripe.” What I mean by that is for a long time the open world was not very inclusive to the general public. However, thanks to, in part, the citizen science movement, there is general public enthusiasm for open research and innovation. It’s hard to predict the future, but I hope that big institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO) will start funding open science initiatives. 

However, the open science movement still needs to prove itself to the world. By nature, computer code lends itself to being openly accessible more easily; you really only need a computer to work on open-source coding projects. Science, on the other hand, is much harder because there is a lack of access, particularly in regards to physical access to laboratories and resources. The validation process can also serve as a barrier. Therefore, figuring out how to break down these barriers to scientific resources and increase the production of scientific work that is open access is something we are incentivized to work on right now—and something we will continue to work on for many years to come.

If you have a question regarding CC Licenses and how they apply to open-source hardware designs or other projects, please feel free to contact us at info@creativecommons.org.

Stop the spread of COVID-19 by taking these steps outlined by the WHO, including washing your hands for at least 20 seconds and social distancing.

The post Just One Giant Lab Co-Founder Leo Blondel on the Power of Community and Open Source During COVID-19 appeared first on Creative Commons.

On the occasion of both Earth Day and World Intellectual Property Day, which this year centers on the theme of Innovation for a Green Future, we’d like to underline the importance of cultural heritage preservation as a response to the threats posed by climate change. In this post, we’ll also share some insights on how Creative Commons (CC) licenses and tools, especially the Public Domain Mark 1.0 (PDM) and the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication tool (CC0 1.0), can be used to help preserve, share, and enjoy cultural heritage. 

Climate change poses serious threats to cultural heritage 

Heavy rainfalls, floods, rising sea levels, untamable wildfires, droughts, and other calamities are some of the dire consequences of climate change, possibly one of the greatest challenges of our time. Besides the disastrous impacts on the environment and biodiversity, climate change also poses significant threats to cultural heritage the world over, in both direct and indirect ways.

Because of global warming, cultural monuments and sites, as well as objects hosted in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs), face the very real threat of being irremediably damaged or lost. In 2015, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee acknowledged  that “World Heritage properties are increasingly affected by climate change.” Climate change has also been shown to contribute to drastic cuts in public funding for culture as well as to lead to a rise in armed conflicts, with the catastrophic knock-on effects of the destruction of cultural heritage. 

As the risk of natural disasters due to climate change increases, many institutions will face a damning reality: when cultural heritage is lost, a part of humanity vanishes.

Of course, climate change is not the only trigger for the loss or destruction of cultural treasures. All too often human error or negligence is to blame for heartrending losses, such as the 2009 collapse of the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne, in which 90% of archival records were buried in the rubble. Thankfully, they were partly rescued later. Another tragic example is the 2018 fire in the National Museum of Brazil, in which 92.5% of its archive of 20 million items went up in flames. As the risk of natural disasters due to climate change increases and as governments shift their funding priorities away from the cultural sector, many institutions will likely face a damning reality: when cultural heritage is lost, a part of humanity vanishes.

Preservation can mitigate the risk of loss

This is why preservation efforts by GLAMs are crucial. At the heart of their mission is to preserve and provide access to cultural heritage to the public. Digitization is nowadays the most trustworthy, effective, and efficient way to ensure cultural heritage can continue to exist for all of us to enjoy, as recognized in the 2015 UNESCO Recommendation concerning the preservation of, and access to, documentary heritage including in digital form as well as under the European Commission’s Report on Digitisation, Online Accessibility and Digital Preservation of Cultural Material.  

Unfortunately, most copyright laws give GLAMs major headaches when it comes to digitizing the works restricted by copyright in their collections for both preservation and online accessibility. Why? Digitization is an act of reproduction, and under copyright law, this act is the prerogative of the copyright owner, unless an exception applies. Unfortunately, exceptions are all too narrow, unclear, and rare. A recent World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) International Conference on Copyright Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries, Archives, Museums, and Educational & Research Institutions made evident the unacceptably skewed balance of the copyright system towards the copyright owner to the detriment of those institutions that care for and help interpret, understand, and share cultural heritage. 

This is the reason CC signed the open letter prepared by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), among others, calling on WIPO to urgently create an international legal instrument with clear rules allowing the preservation of cultural heritage collections. 

Openly sharing collections online with CC’s licenses and tools

Digitized cultural heritage material should be held for preservation purposes but should also be made available online as widely as possible, in order to allow the broadest and most unfettered access to culture. CC is engaged in groundbreaking work in the OpenGLAM space, helping cultural heritage institutions achieve their public interest mission by releasing their content through standard open licenses and tools, as well as offering training on their use, such as through the Creative Commons Certificate.

CC licenses and tools, including CC0, are the easiest and simplest means to communicate to the public what uses can be made of the digital cultural heritage objects and to facilitate wide dissemination of culture. They are becoming the standard for GLAMs that are “opening up” their collections on the internet, helping overcome barriers erected by copyright law and enabling broad reuse.* For material in the public domain, CC offers the PDM, which makes it easy for GLAMs to indicate to users the public domain status of the digital objects made available online. 

GLAMs are entrusted by the world’s population with a vast amount of humanity’s memory—digitizing that memory and using the right legal tools can and should be done.

In connection with the launch of the Smithsonian Open Access initiative in February 2020, CC recalled that GLAMs, as repositories of creative works worldwide, are entrusted by the world’s population with a vast amount of humanity’s memory. Therefore, digitizing that memory and using the right legal tools can and should be done. CC has a solid background in supporting the creation, adoption, and implementation of open policies and projects with cultural heritage institutions, including the MET, Europeana, the Tate, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Auckland Museum, the Rijksmuseum, Wikimedia, and the Brooklyn Museum.

We will continue to explore how best to support GLAMs across the world as they open up their collections, helping them navigate the multiple layers of legal and policy issues with the aim of enabling universal access and participation in culture on the broadest terms possible. We will also keep on pushing for copyright policy change to ensure GLAMs can legally and freely preserve the cultural heritage in their collections, notably as a means to confront the risks posed by climate change. 

For guidance on implementing an open access policy or using CC’s legal tools including CC0, PDM, and our licenses for the preservation and sharing of cultural heritage, please contact us at info@creativecommons.org—we’re here to help.

*Creative Commons licenses (including CC0) should only be applied to digitized cultural heritage material by or with authorization of the copyright owner(s). Doing so ensures the public that both the underlying work and the digital surrogate (in which the digitizing institution may hold copyright) are free for reuse worldwide. CC licenses should only be applied to works under copyright, not to those whose term of protection has lapsed worldwide. The PDM should only be applied to very old works that are out of copyright and in the public domain worldwide. 

The post Using CC Licenses and Tools to Share and Preserve Cultural Heritage in the Face of Climate Change appeared first on Creative Commons.

Since the founding of Creative Commons (CC) in 2001, we’ve been supported by like-minded organizations and individuals who value open access, the open community, and the global commons as much as we do. As we near our 20th anniversary, we are reflecting on the past and planning for the future. What better way to do that than to hear from the supporters who have made our work possible over the last 20 years?

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been a longtime CC supporter and thought partner. We reached out to the Foundation’s President, Larry Kramer, for his thoughts on the value of open access in the Foundation’s philanthropic work and the future he envisions for the open movement. 

Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

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CC: The Hewlett Foundation has been a funder and partner of CC for over a decade. Can you talk about the value the Foundation has found in CC’s work, and why open access is so important?

Larry Kramer: Openness is one of our core guiding principles. We believe that sharing our knowledge and experiences—our challenges as well as our successes—with others can both build trust and invite their ideas for how we can improve. We are committed to continuous learning, and we see open access as a key part of that goal. 

When Creative Commons was founded, the notion that content creators would routinely allow others to use or modify their work seemed far-fetched. Today, Creative Commons stewards a large and growing movement to make knowledge more freely available, to foster collaboration, and to spur advances and improvements that make the world a better place for everyone. At the most basic level, the sharing that Creative Commons facilitates increases the chances that good ideas will be heard and have an impact. We care a lot about that, which is why Creative Commons has been such a longstanding partner. 

CC: In 2014, the Hewlett Foundation extended its open licensing policy to all grantees, writing: “Solving the kinds of challenges the Hewlett Foundation chooses to address requires good ideas, but ideas are not enough. Asking grantees to make sure their ideas are shared, so others can learn from and build on them, will help those ideas go further, be challenged and strengthened, and, in the end, do more good.” 

Can you take us through the process behind this decision?

Larry Kramer: The Hewlett Foundation has long had a policy of making information related to our grantmaking available under an open license so that others can learn from our experience. We share evaluations that our organization commissions, as well as our strategy papers and non-confidential information about individual grants. In 2014, we extended our commitment to open licensing to include, under most circumstances, materials created with our grant dollars. The basic decision was not difficult: we believe in openness and the benefits it produces, and it seemed straightforward to apply that principle to things produced with our funding as well as to things we produce ourselves. But we also knew that a blanket rule would not work, because we support diverse areas of work, produced in many different contexts, by organizations with different operational models. For example, a policy like this would affect researchers at a think tank quite differently from artists in a performing arts organization. So we thought this through carefully and only acted after conversations internally and with grantees, crafting a policy to ensure that it did not inadvertently hurt or burden grantees. At the end of the consultation process, we emerged with a new language for project grants and a toolkit for grantees to understand how to implement these requirements. 

Happily, the shift has worked out very well. In fields with very scant resources, understanding how to actually go about openly licensing something can be confusing. We have tried to build an understanding amongst our grantees and peer funding partners of what open licensing is, and how it can contribute to their goals. Where necessary, we sometimes provide legal counsel to grantees who are trying to figure out the best way to do this. 

CC: Advocates of open access believe that it can lead to a more accessible, equitable, and innovative world. Can you share any examples of how the Foundation has seen this idea at work? 

Larry Kramer: One concrete example is our Images of Empowerment collection of 2,000 openly licensed images of women in 11 countries around the world. It’s well established that visuals can both create and change our biases and inspire action. Several years ago, one of our program officers in our Global Development and Population portfolio wanted to change how we “see” women in developing countries. Working with Getty Images, we funded a new set of stock photos that show women making decisions, earning income, and accessing reproductive health care and services to care for themselves and their families. Our purpose was twofold: provide a more accurate, positive representation of women’s lives and make the images a public good, free for any nonprofit to use. We knew that open licensing would be a necessary component to help encourage use and reuse. Nonprofits seldom have affordable or easy access to images that tell their stories or show their impact. The photographs were intended to fill that gap for both advocates doing this work and newsrooms that cover these issues. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation have since added to the collection, and the full set now includes 2,000 high-quality, editorial images of women working and acting in their communities in Colombia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Peru, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Thailand, Uganda, and the United States. 

Another example is our long-term investment in free, remixable, revisable learning materials, termed as open educational resources (OER). Like CC, Hewlett has been investing in OER since its inception in 2001. We believe that access to knowledge should never be a barrier to learning, and OER provides a stream of high-quality educational opportunities for students around the world. Creative Commons was among our first OER grantees because it provides the backbone of OER’s infrastructure. As OER has grown in usage and as a field, Creative Commons has provided consistent support to our grantees. That work is now benefiting countless students all over the world who have been forced abruptly to switch to distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are lessons being learned about how well these materials can work that will carry over once the pandemic ends. 

CC: What challenges and/or barriers exist that may be stopping other philanthropic foundations from adopting open access policies? 

Larry Kramer: There are at least two sources of hesitation when it comes to embracing open access policies, both of which may apply more broadly than just to philanthropic foundations. First, there’s a lack of understanding about open licensing—what it is, why it matters, and how it works. Open access is an entirely new topic for many organizational leaders. Second, there is also hesitation to impose a new priority of this sort onto the culture of an organization or its grantees. A truly impactful open access policy has implications for every department in the organization—from technical assistance required from a legal team to the Communications Department’s choosing of images for the organization’s website. Change management is always difficult, and something this far-reaching can be a heavy undertaking. 

To encourage open access policies, Creative Commons could build on initiatives like the CC Certificate that approach the topic of open access from different perspectives. While the work itself is about legal licensing, open access can help solve a variety of problems, and it’s important to show that to organizational leaders—to offer stories about what works and how open access can help. It would also help to connect open access policies to other change management efforts that are undertaken at periodic intervals in philanthropic organizations. 

CC: As we look forward five to ten years, what do you think “success” looks like in regards to open access policy and advocacy?

Larry Kramer: The global COVID-19 pandemic has deepened and highlighted longtime inequities that have plagued access to education and basic healthcare around the world. It has also shown how important it is for people to be able to collaborate, learn together, and build on each other’s thinking. It would be wonderful if, in the wake of everything happening in 2020, nations around the world adopt policies that require all publicly funded research and learning resources to be openly licensed. Given the crisis of access to learning materials exposed by the need to use distance learning, we should see an increase in educational institutions’ support for creating and using OER. We would also welcome commitments from other foundations to join us in adopting open access policies so that efforts and products intended to benefit the public good can be owned and freely used by the public. 

Please consider donating to Creative Commons so that we can continue stewarding the CC licenses and building the open access tools and platforms individuals and organizations, like The Hewlett Foundation, use to share. If you’d like to learn more about implementing open access policies and utilizing open licenses, check out the CC Certificate course or this free ebook. 

Thank you to Larry Kramer for offering his time and thoughtful words, Neha Gohil for helping us pull this piece together, and the entire staff of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for their support. 

The post Open Access in Practice: A Conversation with President Larry Kramer of The Hewlett Foundation appeared first on Creative Commons.

The benefits of open access (OA) are undeniable and increasingly evident across all academic disciplines and scientific research: making academic publications¹ freely and openly accessible and reusable provides broad visibility for authors, a better return on investment for funders, and greater access to knowledge for other researchers and the general public. And yet, despite OA’s obvious advantages, some researchers choose to publish their research papers under restrictive licenses, under the mistaken belief that by doing so they are safeguarding academic integrity. 

Academic fraud, whether in the guise of cheating, copying, plagiarism or using the services of essay mills, is no doubt a serious issue for the academic community the world over. This age-old problem has been happening since long before digital technologies and open licenses (such as CC Licenses) were on the scene, however. Clearly, OA is neither to blame for academic fraud nor does it invite it or make it worse. 

In this blog post, we explain that applying restrictive licenses to academic publications is a misguided approach to addressing concerns over academic integrity. Specifically, we make it clear that using Creative Commons “No Derivatives” (ND) licenses on academic publications is not only ill-advised for policing academic fraud but also and more importantly unhelpful to the dissemination of research, especially publicly-funded research. We also show that the safeguards in place within truly open licenses (like CC BY or CC BY-SA) are well-suited to curbing malicious academic behavior, above and beyond other existing recourses for academic fraud and similar abuses. 

No Derivatives licenses (CC BY-ND and CC BY-NC-ND) allow people to copy and distribute a work but prohibit them from adapting, remixing, transforming, translating, or updating it, in any way that makes a derivative. In short, people are not allowed to create “derivative works” or adaptations.

Researchers are the ultimate remixers

Researchers publish to be read, to have impact, and to make the world a better place. To accomplish these important goals, researchers need to enable reuse and adaptations of their research publications and data. They also need to be able to reuse and adapt the publications and data of others. Isaac Newton, one of the most influential scientists of all time, famously declared: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” meaning the production of new knowledge can only be achieved if researchers can rely on the ideas and publications of their peers and predecessors and revisit, reuse, and transform them, adding layer upon layer of new insights. Researchers are the ultimate remixers—OA is the ultimate way to make remixing possible. 

ND licensed publications are not Open Access

Articles published under an ND license are not considered OA, as first defined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative and in its 2012 recommendations. ND licenses overly restrict reuse of content by fellow researchers and thus curtail their opportunity to contribute to the advancement of knowledge. This is the main reason why it is inadvisable to apply ND licenses to academic publications. Although ND licenses are used for certain types of content, such as official documents that are not meant to be substantively modified, using them to forbid adaptations of academic publications flies in the face of the ethos of academic research. If anything, the ND element harms researchers.

For instance, ND licenses prevent translations. Hence, given that English is the dominant language of academia, ND licenses place barriers to accessing knowledge by non-English speakers and limit the outreach of research beyond the English-speaking world. ND licenses also prevent the adaptation of the graphs, images or diagrams included in academic articles (unless separately licensed under a license permitting their adaptation), which are essential to achieve wider dissemination of the ideas expressed therein. 

Reusers might also be discouraged by how differently “adaptations” might be defined under copyright law in different jurisdictions and how differently exceptions and limitations (E&L) might apply. A notable example is the use of text and data mining (TDM) processes to generate new knowledge. Some laws are very clear about the ability of researchers to do TDM as an exception to copyright even when an adaptation is arguably made during the TDM process, and even when the output can almost never be said to constitute an adaptation of any one input. The use of an ND license might be erroneously interpreted to discourage such perfectly lawful activity altogether, and therefore present another hurdle to the progress of science. ²

Some remixes are still possible under ND licenses

Be that as it may, ND licenses do not completely bar the possibility of reusing and adapting academic publications. First, the licenses do not limit the rights that users have by virtue of the application of copyright’s exceptions and limitations, such as quotation, review, criticism or under the general doctrines of fair dealing or fair use. Further, our FAQ clarifies that, generally, no derivative work is made of the original from which an excerpt is taken when the portion is used to illustrate an idea or provide an example in another larger work. This is solely an act of reproduction, not of improving upon the pre-existing work in a way that could create an adaptation in violation of the ND license. All CC licenses grant the right to reproduce a CC-licensed work for noncommercial purposes (at a minimum). 

Moreover, anyone wishing to adapt ND-licensed publications can seek authorization from the author, who may grant an individual license. This, however, adds unnecessary transaction costs for reusers, who might choose to use different sources rather than go through the often tedious process of requesting permission. 

Despite the ways other researchers are legally able to reuse ND-licensed works, they leave much to be desired in the academic context.

All CC Licenses require attribution 

Multiple protections against reputational and attribution risks are embedded in all CC licenses, which have a strong legal history of enforcement actions against reusers that violate the licenses’ terms. These safeguards, that are in addition to and not in replacement of academic norms and practices, are in place to provide an additional layer of protection for the original authors’ reputation and to alleviate their concerns over changes to their works that might be wrongly attributed to them, such as:

• Attribution is a requirement for all six CC licenses. Attribution (often called a “citation” in the academe) must be provided to the extent reasonable with regard to the means, medium and context of the reuse, absent a request by the author not to do so (in cases where the author believes the use is one from which s/he wishes to distance him/herself, licensees must remove attribution to the extent reasonable). 
• Reusers are prohibited from using attribution in any way that suggests the author endorses the views of the reuser.
• Changes made to the original licensed works must be indicated by the reuser and a link back to the original must be provided. This allows further reusers to see what was modified and, thus, what can only be attributed to the reuser and not the original author. For details, see section 3.a of the Legal Code for CC BY 4.0 licenses. 

Copyright is not the best framework to uphold academic integrity

Overall, copyright law and CC Licenses are not the most appropriate frameworks to address problems of academic integrity. Better results can certainly be achieved through compliance with and enforcement of relevant, well-established and enduring institutional and social norms, ethics policies, and moral codes of conduct. All told, researchers are not doing themselves or the global academe a favor when they share their publications under ND licenses. To optimize their dissemination and increase their social impact, we recommend sharing academic publications under the most open terms possible, i.e. by applying a CC BY license to the article and CC0 to the data.

We’re happy to provide further assistance and support in the interpretation of CC licenses, as well as in understanding open access for researchers. If you need help, get in touch info@creativecommons.org.

Notes

1. Academic publications broadly include scholarly, academic, scientific and research books, journals, and articles/papers. Academic publications are often publicly funded.
2. All 4.0 ND licenses permit text and data mining even if adaptations are created during the process, or as an output; however, adaptations may not be shared further and may only be used for internal or personal purposes.

The post Why Sharing Academic Publications Under “No Derivatives” Licenses is Misguided appeared first on Creative Commons.

Momentum continues to swell in support of the Open COVID Pledge, with the announcement today by Amazon, Facebook, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Microsoft, and Sandia National Laboratories, that they are pledging their patents to the public to freely use in support of solving the COVID-19 pandemic. Following in the footsteps of Intel, Fabricatorz Foundation, and many others, these companies join as Founding Adopters of the Pledge by releasing hundreds of thousands of patents for use worldwide by researchers, scientists, and others who are working to end the and minimize the impact of the disease, including through research, diagnosis, prevention, and containment.

Creative Commons announced its formal support for the project earlier this month, joining forces with legal experts, researchers, and scientists to create the pledge and licenses. This included the publication of two new licenses last week. The licenses now give adopters the ability to choose between licensing all of their copyrights and patents, and licensing only their patents. You can learn more about the licenses on the website.

CC’s involvement in this coalition is a natural fit given our goal of supporting and promoting the sharing of intellectual property freely with the public in order to advance the dissemination of knowledge. Our work since the announcement has focused on building informational resources including a new set of FAQs, drafting and updating the licenses, connecting with those wishing to adopt the pledge and license their IP, and strategizing with other members of the coalition about how the project can best connect adopters with those using the licensed IP to maximize impact. We look forward to continuing this work and sharing these success stories.

Companies, universities, organizations, and individuals can make or support the Open COVID Pledge by visiting https://opencovidpledge.org or contacting opencovidpledge@gmail.com.

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