Last year Creative Commons and a global coalition of organizations launched the Open Policy Network in order to support the creation, adoption, and implementation of policies that require that publicly funded resources are openly licensed resources. When open licenses are required for publicly funded resources, there is the potential to massively increase access to and re-use of a wide range of materials, from educational content like digital textbooks, to the results of scholarly research, to valuable public sector data.

The Network has expanded to include over 50 organizations. During the planning of the Open Policy Network, we identified a set of activities to work on in order to educate about and advance the adoption of global open licensing policies. Over the last few months Creative Commons was pleased to secure funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to provide modest grants to Open Policy Network members to work on these timely and important action areas. We solicited applications from interested organizations and ran a competitive funding process. We’re happy to announce the winners of the project grant funds, and we look forward to working with Open Policy Network members as they engage in these initiatives.

Openness Guides for OER and open policy (Centrum Cyfrowe)

This project will create guides that extend upon the existing “How Open Is it?” project originally developed for open access articles by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) in 2013. This guide is seen as an important educational tool for the open access community – including publishers and authors – which provides some nuance around a spectrum of openness and shows a roadmap to becoming “more open.” We see these guides being used in practice as something governments and advocates can use to advocate for open policies.

Model open policies and advocacy / implementation resources (CC South Africa/re:share/Kelsey Wiens)

This project will create and distribute model open policy resources, a task central to the mission of the Open Policy Network. Model resources may include:  model open policy language (sections and entire open education, research, and data policies); open policy implementation kits with slides and talking points; communications: media / public relations resources, case studies about open policies; research: evaluating existing open policies and writing open policy briefs. The majority of these resources will be targeted for policy making audiences (e.g. legislators, regulators, etc.), but there will also be a subset of meta-materials that provides some advice and recommendations for advocates in how to best work with policymakers around these issues

Annual reports on the “state of open policy” (Consortia of Centrum Cyfrowe, CC South Africa/re:share, Karisma Foundation, SPARC, CommonSphere, AusGOAL)

This project will develop, research, and produce a yearly “state-of-play” report on open policy around the world. The reports will document major open policy adoptions and updates tracked via the Policy Registry, and discuss future areas for intervention. The reports will leverage Open Policy Network members to collect and package an in depth (with useful graphs and analysis) report on the latest updates in open policy around the world covering: education (OER), research (OA), and open data. This report will be a way of measuring nations, provinces/states, and institutions commitments to open policy; and a tool to recruit new open policy advocates and generate interest in governments, foundations, and other funders.

Open Government Partnership (SPARC)

This project will examine the current state of the Open Government Partnership commitments and match member countries with relevant OER projects and individuals in country. Momentum for this idea is already building in a number of countries, including the United States, Slovakia, South Africa, Tunisia, and Sierra Leone, and Romania. The initiative will work to include OER and open policy in updated Open Government Partnership plans through education and outreach.

If you’re interested in having your organization join the Open Policy Network, check out our website, Google Group, and follow us on Twitter.