The Library of Congress / No known copyright restrictions

Sign up for these facilitated courses

this week (sign-up will remain open through Sunday, March 17). These courses will start the week of March 18 (next week!). To sign up, simply click the “Start Course” button under the course’s menu navigation on the left.

• Copyright 4 Educators (US) – Sign up if you’re an educator who wants to learn about US copyright law in the education context.
• Copyright 4 Educators (AUS) – Sign up if you’re an educator who wants to learn about Australian copyright, statutory licenses and open educational resources (OER).
• Creative Commons for K-12 Educators – Sign up if you’re a K-12 educator (anywhere in the world) who wants to learn how to find and adapt free, useful resources for your classroom, and incorporate activities that teach your students digital world skills.
• Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond – Sign up if you want to learn how to edit Wikipedia or improve your editing skills — especially if you are interested in and knowledgeable about open educational resources (OER) (however, no background in this area is required).

All other courses are now ready for you to take

at any time, with or without your peers. They include:

• Get a CC license. Put it on your website – This course is exactly what the title says: it will help you with the steps of getting a CC license and putting it on your work. It’s tailored to websites, although the same steps apply to most other works.
• Open Science: An Introduction – This course is a collaborative learning environment meant to introduce the idea of Open Science to young scientists, academics, and makers of all kinds. Open Science is a tricky thing to define, but we’ve designed this course to share what we know about it, working as a community to make this open resource better.
• Open data for GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) – This course is for professionals in cultural institutions who are interested in opening up their data as open culture data. It will guide you through the different steps towards open data and provide you with extensive background information on how to handle copyright and other possible issues.
• Intro to Openness in Education – This is an introductory course exploring the history and impacts of openness in education. The main goal of the course is to give you a broad but shallow grounding in the primary areas of work in the field of open education.
• A Look at Open Video – This course will give you a quick overview of some of the issues, tools and areas of interest in the area of open video. It is aimed at students interested in developing software, video journalists, editors and all users of video who want to take their knowledge further.
• Contributing to Wikimedia Commons – A sister project of Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons is a repository of openly licensed images that people all over the world use and contribute to. This challenge gets you acquainted with uploading your works to the commons.
• Open Detective – This course will help you explore the scale of open to non-open content and how to tell the difference.

And more… check out all the courses at http://schoolofopen.org/.

Join a launch event this week

School of Open at the Citizen Science Workshop / Levi Simons / CC BY

• P2PU: A Showcase of Open Peer Learning (Wednesday, March 13) – Join this webinar to see a showcase of some of P2PU’s best learning groups spanning topics from education to open content to programming to Spanish and more, and learn how you can participate.
• Open Video Sudan (all week, March 10-17) – Join the Open Video Forum in improving “A Look at Open Video” and creating new courses and resources on open video in Sudan.

And more events as part of Open Education Week at http://www.openeducationweek.org/events-webinars/.

Spread the word

Just do these 3 things and call it a day.

1. Tweet this:

#SchoolofOpen has launched! Take free courses on #copyright, #OER, #openscience & more: http://creativecommons.org/?p=37179

2. Blog and email this:

The School of Open has launched! Take a free online course on copyright, CC licenses, Wikipedia, open science, open culture, open video formats, and more at http://schoolofopen.org/. Especially check out this course: [link to course of your choice here]. Read more about the launch at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/37179.

3. Print out a copy of this pdf and pin it to the bulletin board at your work, school, or local coffee shop.

Photo by

Celebrating Open Data

Open Data Day 2013 can be described as a success. Why? Because hundreds of people participated in more than 100 events distributed across six continents all over the world, celebrating open data and all that we can do with it. Here at CC, we planned and executed a community-supported event to build open learning resources around the topic of Open Science, done in a hackathon-style sprint event that gathered people with diverse backgrounds and experience levels. An undergraduate student and a post-doc researcher, both from Stanford. An instructional designer from Los Angeles and an associate professor from Auburn University, plus a handful more of very talented people. Oh, and a mother and high school-aged daughter duo that simply wanted to see what “open” is about. We all connected to help build an open course to teach others about Open Science. Here’s how we did it.

Open Content for Learning

It’s worth mentioning that the course materials that were produced during the sprint will be openly licensed CC BY and shared so that their benefit to Open Education and Open Science are not restricted by legal boundaries. The material is being curated and will undergo a review process over the next couple weeks before being ported to the School of Open, a collaborative project by Creative Commons, P2PU, and a strong volunteer community of “open” experts and organizations. Though fitting the content to P2PU’s online course platform was in the back of our minds, time and consideration were largely placed on identifying important ideas that explain what Open Access, Open Research, and Open Data mean for Open Science, and how we can engage more “young scientists” (this is an ever-broadening term) in the ways of Open.

Photo by Billy Meinke / CC-BY

The Net Works Effect*

Adding a layer on top of open content itself, which is elastic in nature, our approach to this hackathon-style event focused on being very lean, the type of event that can be run by anyone, anywhere, and requiring very few resources. We created a Google Drive folder and a set of publicly-editable documents to collect openly-licensed resources, map out a tentative module/lesson plan, coordinate communications between participants, and generally provide a single place to collaborate on Open Science learning materials. Connecting with other event organizers at the OKFN and PLOS, mailing lists, Twitter hashtags, and other forms of communication were established so that there was a support network for those who were organizing events and those who were interested in participating in Open Data Day events on some level. David Eaves, Rufus Pollock, Ross Mounce, and many others were loud and clear on the Open Data Day mailing list, making sure news about each event was passed around.

Before the event, a registration page was created for the course sprint. We offered a handful of in-person tickets for folks to come down to our office in Mountain View, as well as a number of remote participant tickets for those who were in different geographical locations. Google Hangout “rooms” were set up on laptop computers placed in physical conference rooms at the CC HQ, allowing remote participants to work in real-time with persons on the ground. To see a more detailed description of the day’s event, see the schedule document here.

Deliverables

So what did we make? The sprinters involved in the project collected and organized resources that explain common aspects of Open Science. The main sections (access, methods, data) were helpful in searching for content, but there was a great deal of overlap between sections, which highlighted the relationhips between them. Beyond the collection of resources, sets of tasks were built that are meant to guide learners out beyond the course and into the communities of Open Science, interacting with the ideas, technical systems, and people who are opening up science. The Introduction to Open Science course on P2PU is still in a lightly-framed state, but the plan is to include the course in the launch of the School of Open during Open Education Week, March 11-15. If you’re interested in helping make this transition or to help build or review other courses that we call “open,” come introduce yourself in the School of Open Google Group. Or check out what else is happening on P2PU.

Beyond the course itself, we’re going to take a look at the sprint process we used, and work out some of the kinks. This rapid open-content creation technique is manageable, low-cost, and builds the Commons. There’s enough openly-licensed content existing on the web to produce a range of learning experiences, so now it seems that it’s a matter of developing open technology tools to the point where we can build education on the web together, easily. For more information about this and other Open Education projects being worked on by Creative Commons, see this page.

We Got Together for Open

Thanks to those who were able to participate in the Open Science course, as well as those who contributed the planning documents leading up to the event. We’ve done well.

Related Posts

PLOS Sci-Ed Blog, Guest Post: Open Data Day, Course Sprints, and Hackathons!
David Eaves’ Blog, International #OpenDataDay: Now at 90 Cities (and… the White House)
Debbie Morrison’s Blog, A Course Design ‘Sprint’: My Experience in an Education Hackathon

Also: The Flickr album from the event can be found here.

*This phrase coined by P. Kishor here, describing the interconnectedness of Open Data Day events.

Logo by Greg Emmerich / CC-BY-SA

An Education Sprint

The future of Open is a dynamic landscape, ripe with opportunities to increase civic engagement, literacy, and innovation. Towards this goal, the Science Program at Creative Commons is teaming up with the Open Knowledge Foundation and members of the Open Science Community to facilitate the building of an open online course, an Introduction to Open Science. The actual build will take place during a hackathon-style “sprint” event on Open Data Day on Saturday, February 23rd and will serve as a launch course for the School of Open during Open Education Week (Mar 11-15).

Want to help us build this?

The course will be open in it’s entirety, the building process and content all available to be worked on, all to help people learn about Open Science. Do you know a thing or two about Open Access? Are you a researcher who’s practicing Open Research? Do you have experience in instructional or visual design? This is an all-hands event and will be facilitated by representatives at CC, OKFN, and others in the Community. Open Science enthusiasts in the Bay Area are invited to the CC Headquarters in Mountain View for the live event. Remote participants will also be able to join and contribute online via Google Hangout.

The day will begin with coffee, refreshments and a check-in call with other Open Data Day Hackathons happening around the globe. The Open Science Community is strengthened by shared interests and connections between people, which we hope will grow stronger through networked events on Open Data Day. The Open Science course sprint at CC HQ will build upon open educational content, facilitate the design of challenges for exploration, and provide easy entry for learners into concepts of Open Access, Open Research, and Open Data. It will be done in a similar fashion to other “sprint-style” content-creation events, with lunch and refreshments provided for in-person participants. We’re literally going to be hacking on education. Sound like something you’d be interested in?

Join us.

For details about the ways you can participate, see the Eventbrite page here.
To see the draft (lightly framed) course site on Peer to Peer University, go here.
For information about other Open Data Day events, see the events wiki here.

Opendataday.org/map

Developers

We need you, too! Basic skills for working with open datasets is important, and can be difficult to grasp. Who better to develop great lessons about working with data than you? Similarly, for those interested in building upon apps and projects from other Open Data Events, updated source code and repository information will be posted to a public feed (for now, follow hashtags #ODHD13 and #opendataday on Twitter).

For other information, contact billy dot meinke at creative commons dot org or @billymeinke.

This event is being organized by the Science Program at Creative Commons with support from the Open Knowledge Foundation, PLOS, and members of the Open Science Community.

Open Science Logo / gemmerich / CC BY-SA

Creative Commons is seeking a Project Coordinator for Science and Data! The Project Coordinator will organize, coordinate and manage projects related to data policy and governance and perform research and analysis on data governance topics across relevant sectors — particularly for science — and communicate results and recommendations from the project via writing and related outreach.

We are looking for someone who is experienced in policy analysis, development and processes, in addition to Open Source Software, Open Access/Open Data and other Open content projects. A science and/or legal background with international experience is highly desirable — especially as the position will be representing Creative Commons at global events in the Open Data and Open Science communities! See the job posting and apply at our opportunities page.

We will stop accepting applications after 11:59 p.m. PDT, May 25, 2012.

Josh Sommer

Donate

“I’m in a race; a race to outrun a rare and deadly form of bone cancer called chordoma, with an average survival of 7 years. To find a cure, there is a lot that needs to happen sequentially, so to win the race, I need science to move quickly. Fortunately, uncanny new technologies in genomics, computing, synthetic biology, etc. have put cures for virtually any disease within the realm of possibility. Unfortunately, the way we practice science is not designed to move on the timescale of an individual’s disease.

Despite all of the technological advances that have been made in recent years, it still takes on average 1-3 years for results to be transmitted from one lab to the next; it still takes months or years for materials and data to be transferred between institutions; and untold masses of observations and creations never get shared at all. It’s no wonder, then, why it takes decades for discoveries to be translated into new treatments, and why the hurdles are often just too large to overcome for small-market diseases like chordoma.

For anyone affected, or whose loved one is affected, by a life threatening disease, this is simply intolerable. Think about it: in the very recent past, humankind has developed the tools and know-how to cure disease, yet we are stifled from maximizing the potential benefit of these new tools by social and legal systems that evolved in a bygone era. This has to change.

But let’s be realistic. Despite the fact that our scientific enterprise is not optimized for speed, it does have many virtues. And traditions such as academic tenure, peer review, intellectual property, and shareholder return are not going away any time soon – nor should they, necessarily. If we can sequence a genome in the course of a week, surely we can find sensible solutions to enable the data to be shared.

Creative Commons is leading the charge to find these solutions. By helping researchers make data open and available, by streamlining the material transfer process, and by uncovering and integrating data from various stakeholders, Creative Commons is grease to the wheels of science. It is a source of hope to me in the race to outrun my disease. It is a means to maximize our collective investment in research. That’s why I support Creative Commons, and why if there’s a disease you’d like to see cured, I urge you to give whole-heartedly to Creative Commons as well.”

Josh Sommer is the executive director of the Chordoma Foundation, which he co-founded with his mother, Dr. Simone Sommer, after he was diagnosed with a clival chordoma in 2006. He believes that patients should play an active role in bringing about treatments for their own conditions, and that patients represent a largely untapped source of funding, energy, and know-how in the treatment development process. Follow Josh on Twitter.

Science@creativecommons by Creative Commons / CC BY

November has been an exciting month for science at Creative Commons. Earlier this month we hosted a Creative Commons Salon in San Francisco on the promises and pitfalls of personalized medicine, which you can now watch online. We met a matching giving challenge by Hindawi, the open access scholarly journal publisher (disciplines from neuroscience to pharmacology), who doubled $3000 in donations to our annual fundraising campaign. We also saw BioMed Central, the world’s largest OA publisher, provide in-kind support for our fundraising campaign.

The icing on the cake is the most recent addition to our CC Store: this super-cool science-themed CC shirt, for which the world-famous XKCD was gracious enough to let us re-use a variation on a classic cartoon. Many of you may already read and enjoy the delightful webcomic of “romance, sarcasm, math, and language” which is under a CC BY-NC license. Now you can show your love for Creative Commons and science at the same time by buying one of these t-shirts, available for $20 over at the CC store.

Huge thanks to XKCD for being such a wonderful and creative member of the CC community, and for freely sharing that creativity with the world.

At Creative Commons, we see a lot of potential for bringing open access to the world of science, whether it pertains to genomics research, scholarly journal publishing, or unraveling the mysteries of the universe.

If you love science as much as we do, then hurry over to the CC Store and get your limited edition shirt today!

“Two practical workshops on open education were organized by the Coalition for Open Education (KOED) in coincidence with two conferences taking place in Warsaw in April and May 2009: the conference on open education on 23rd of April 2009 and the conference on open science on 6th of May 2009. The first workshop, conducted by Susan d’Antoni from UNESCO and Richard Baraniuk from the Connexions project at Rice University, provided an overview of practical issues tied to open education, such as community building, IT tools and development strategies. The second workshop, led by Ahrash Bissell from ccLearn, focused on open licensing issues.

The two workshops were attended by a dozen representatives of NGOs active in the field of education and culture, as well as representatives from the Ministry of Education. Most important, they provided an opportunity for people working with open educational projects or considering starting such a project to meet and network.

As a result of the project, the Coalition for Open Education hopes to increase its number of member institutions, as well as enable the growth of open educational projects in Poland.”

For information on the conferences themselves, check out Alek’s detailed reports for both.

Open Educational Resources in Poland

The conference, “Open Educational Resources in Poland”, was organized on the 23rd of April, 2009 in the Column Hall of the Parliament of the Republic of Poland by the Coalition for Open Education (KOED). The conference was held under the honorary patronage of Bronisław Komorowski – the Marshal of the Parliament of the Republic of Poland.

The aim of the conference was to present the open education movement and the model of open educational materials for all levels of the educational process, to argue for the importance of open education in Poland, and to increase broad interest and involvement. This first-in-its-kind event, organized as a parliamentary conference, drew the attention of both government members and Parliament members to the issue of open education.

The conference was attended by 250 participants, including government officials, educators and scientists, librarians and NGO representatives. Among honorary participants were: Bronisław Komorowski, the Marshal of the Parliament; Katarzyna Hall, the Minister of Education, and several members of the Parliament: Krzysztof Tyszkiewicz, Andrzej Celiński, Marcin Zawiła, Renata Butryn, Tadeusz Ross and Tadeusz Borowski.

Opening the conference, Bronisław Komorowski said: “I hope that the conference will result in a great advance regarding these issues, so that we will be closer to the world we dream of, in which knowledge is easily accessible”.

Speaking after him, Katarzyna Hall, Minister of Education declared Ministry’s interest in open educational models as means of creating modern and effective education. “Especially in small towns and villages [...] internet makes education more democratic, more accessible, so that important resources are available at any time”, said Hall.

The first session of the conference was devoted to highlighting the state of the global movement for open education and presenting achievements in the field of open educational resources development. Speeches were given by Susan D’Antoni from UNESCO and Richard Baraniuk from the Connexions project at Rice University. The second part of the conference concerned open education in Poland. Presentations were given by Marek Niezgódka from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling at the University of Warsaw, who spoke about the challenges of building open higher education and science in Poland; Krzysztof Stanowski from the Ministry of National Education and Grażyna Czetweryńska from the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research at University of Warsaw, who discussed the use of open models in the “Polish school” project, which coordinates Polish-language education for Polish students living abroad; Alek Tarkowski from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling at the University of Warsaw and Creative Commons Poland who presented legal and regulatory aspects of open education; and Tomasz Ganicz from the Wikimedia Poland Association, who spoke about open access to public information and data, treated as potential educational resources.

The conference ended with a debate, during which Members of the Parliament presented their viewpoints.

Krzysztof Tyszkiewicz focused on the issue of open school textbooks, as a means to revolutionize education in Poland, and an issue that concerns both students and their parents. “School textbooks currently cost several hundred złotys a year. Textbooks built in the open access model will provide a free alternative”, said Tyszkiewicz.

Andrzej Celiński spoke about the obligation of the government to provide open access to educational resources, especially in the light of long-term challenges that Poland will face.

“Taking into account that social and intellectual capital, capital that has intellectual property as its source, is today a key form of capital, government – with its regulatory tools – cannot ignore its responsibilities in this field”, said Celiński. He also furthermore stressed the importance of quality control for educational materials and of cooperation between governmental bodies and third sector actors.

Marcin Zawiła stressed the importance of legal reform in support of open education, as well as openness of other types of public content, such as audiovisual heritage. “Public mandate, an obligation for publicly funded works to constitute open resources, is the right direction for changes”, said Zawiła and declared support for introducing such a mandate in Poland.

The conference proved the importance of further introducing open models into the Polish educational system, at all its levels. More importantly, it proved the interest of government officials, members of the Parliament and educators in building together open education in Poland. As an outcome of the conference, KOED coalition will continue talks with relevant Ministries regarding open access to educational and scientific materials, as well as introducing an open mandate for publicly funded content.

The Coalition for Open Education (Koalicja Otwartej Edukacji – KOED, http://koed.org.pl) is a partnership of organizations founded at the end of 2008 to promote open education and science in Poland. Coalitions’ founding institutions include the Modern Poland Foundation, the Polish Librarians Association, Wikimedia Poland Association and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling at the University of Warsaw.

Open Science in Poland

The conference, “Open Science in Poland”, was organized on the 5th of May, 2009 at the University of Warsaw by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling at the University of Warsaw, partner institution of Creative Commons Poland and founding member of Coalition for Open Education. The conference was organized as part of the “Open the Book” project in order to highlight the importance of introducing in Poland open models of scientific collaboration and communication.

The conference was organized under the honorary patronage of Professor Barbara Kudrycka, the Minister of Science and Higher Education, Professor Katarzyna Chałasińska-Macukow, Chairman of the Conference of Rectors of Academic Schools in Poland (KRASP) and Professor Michał Kleiber, Chairman of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

The first session provided an overview of three key elements of open science: open access to scientific content, open education and new models of scientific communication described as “Science 2.0”. Presentations were given by Ahrash Bissell (Creative Commons ccLearn), Ignasi Labastida i Juan (University of Barcelona, Creative Commons Catalunya) and Paweł Szczęsny (Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Department of Biology, University of Warsaw).

The second part of the conference concerned open science in the Polish context. Marek Niezgódka, director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling at the University of Warsaw gave an overview of the open projects currently undertaken in Poland, and of the challenges they face. Jan Kozłowski from the Center for Science Policy and Higher Education Studies at University of Warsaw spoke about alternatives to classical peer review. Alek Tarkowski from Creative Commons Poland spoke about legal issues related to open science, and in particular about open licensing methods.

The conference ended with a panel debate among conference speakers, chaired by Edwin Bendyk from the “Polityka” weekly and attended as well by Krzysztof Gulda, Director of the Department of Strategy and Development of Science at the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Mr Gulda declared the interest of the Ministry in introducing open science models in Poland, as part of the current reform of the scientific system. In particular, he declared that the Ministry is considering introducing an open mandate for publicly funded scientific content.

The conference took place to a full attendance, with over 100 participants attending. These included representatives of the scientific community, librarians and archivists, scientific publishers and governmental officials.

The conference presented an opportunity to present the project “Open the Book” (http://otworzksiazke.pl), which will become public on the 20th of May. “Open the Book” is a collection of scientific books made available under Creative Commons licenses by their authors and made available online. The project serves to highlight the importance of open access to scientific content and to promote open scientific models among Polish scientists. The project is organized under the patronage of Michał Kleiber, the chairman of the Polish Academy of Science and with the support of the Polish National Library. The project is funded by EEA and Norway Grants, through the Scholarship and Training Fund.

The conference was organized with the support of the Open Society Institute.