Today, Creative Commons (CC) is excited to announce new programmatic support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) to help make openly licensed preprints the primary vehicle of scientific dissemination.

“We are delighted to have been awarded this new grant to help us leverage our expertise to make life sciences research more open and accessible,” said Catherine Stihler, CC CEO. “From open review to translation to AI and machine-learning applications, realizing the full potential of preprints is predicated on them being openly licensed.”

The eighteen-month grant will enable CC to collaborate with CZI on a project focused on significantly increasing use of the CC BY 4.0 license on preprints in the life sciences by working with funders, preprint servers, and other preprint stakeholders.

“Preprint servers have seen a marked increase in uploads across many scientific disciplines, particularly in the life sciences¹, spurred by recognition of the importance of timely, open access to research results during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Dario Taraborelli, Science Program Officer at CZI. “Preprints are not only a faster pathway to the dissemination of research results, they also enable the development of an entire scholarly communication ecosystem around them. We are excited to partner with CC to further develop and strengthen this ecosystem and bring together funders, institutions, preprint servers, and other stakeholders to promote openly licensed preprints.”

“We are so pleased to have our open access research work further supported by CZI,” said Cable Green, CC Director of Open Knowledge. “Opening preprints is essential to our strategy to support better sharing, which includes helping scientists open and share all the components of their research — without long publication timelines — to support access, text and data mining, reproducibility, and further inquiry.”

This work will complement activities already underway with CC and our partners in the Open Climate Campaign, a multi-year project to promote open access to research to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity, and our Open Climate Data Project, an initiative to help open large climate datasets.

1. See https://github.com/nicholasmfraser/covid19_preprints