“United Nations Headquarters” by United Nations Photo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

As an important part of our stewardship of the Open COVID Pledge, we are pleased to announce that the Pledge is now available in all six of the official languages of the United Nations: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. This increases accessibility and usefulness of the Pledge to more than 3.7 billion persons in their first or second languages. We are also excited to be launching a simple translation process through which any member of our community can contribute translations of the Pledge in other languages at our upcoming 2020 CC Global Summit.

Understanding and communicating the value of the Pledge is a critical part of encouraging companies, universities, research teams, and others to contribute their valuable IP to help solve COVID-19 quickly. As we begin working with the CC Global Network to increase the Pledge’s reach and secure additional Pledges, we’ll also be working with our community to translate information and adoption guides as they become increasingly important.

These are the first internationalization efforts that CC is undertaking since we announced our leadership of the OCP work in August—but they’re certainly not the last. In addition to launching the simplified translation process, we’ll also be discussing advocacy and outreach techniques at next week’s CC Global Summit, where we’ll be gathering our community’s ideas for how they can contribute to this effort. We’ll also be identifying tools that will assist with outreach both to those who hold valuable intellectual property as well as those seeking to use the IP that is pledged at that workshop on Wednesday, October 21. In addition, founders of the OCP will provide an informational overview of the OCP project for newbies on Tuesday, October 20, where companies that have adopted the pledge will share their reasons for joining. Finally, watch for us to announce an expansion of the CC OCP Advisory Council early next year to ensure better international expertise and diversity.

In combination and alongside other collaborations, we expect these efforts will scale the OCP internationally to create critical mass and impact. You can support our international efforts by joining us at the CC Summit and sharing your ideas for effort by encouraging your company, university, or research team to make the Open COVID Pledge. Visit opencovidpledge.org or contact us at ocpinfo@creativecommons.org for more information.