The Silicon Valley Nonprofit Also Takes Up Baton of Wiley’s Trailblazing OpenContent Project

Palo Alto, California, USA — Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a layer of reasonable copyright, announced today that OpenContent founder Dr. David Wiley, Assistant Professor of Instructional Technology at Utah State University, will join Creative Commons and officially close the OpenContent Project.

“When I saw the Creative Commons team, and all their expertise, I saw that they ‘got it,'” said Wiley. “I slowly came to the somewhat painful realization that the best thing I could do for the community was to close the OpenContent project and encourage people to adopt the Creative Commons licenses.”

The OpenContent Project launched in 1998, offering the first license designed specifically to support the free and open sharing of content. While working to evangelize the idea of “open content,” Dr. Wiley next worked with members of the open source software community and commercial publishers to develop an open content license that would be acceptable to publishers. Since its release, numerous books have been published under the terms of the resulting Open Publication License, including titles by O’Reilly, Prentice Hall, New Riders, and the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. Copies of the OpenContent License and Open Publication License will continue to be available from the OpenContent website, http://opencontent.org/, for archival purposes, but newcomers to the site will be encouraged to visit Creative Commons, https://creativecommons.org/, to utilize the licenses available on their site. Neither of the OpenContent licenses will be developed further in the future.

Creative Commons Executive Director Glenn Otis Brown commented: “It is an honor to welcome a pioneer like Professor Wiley to the Creative Commons team. His efforts have been a major source of inspiration for our own, so it is both appropriate and a little humbling for us to be working alongside him now.”

Wiley joins Creative Commons in the capacity of Project Lead for Educational Licensing. “Because I’m an instructional technologist, and my primary field of research and inquiry is using technology to better support learning, my own https://creativecommons.org Press Release work in open content has always focused on reusable educational media. I couldn’t be happier than I am to participate in this manner,” said Wiley.

Creative Commons will announce new Project Leads for a Developing Nations License shortly, said Brown.

More about Creative Commons

A non-profit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use of intellectual works — whether owned or public domain. It is sustained by the generous support of The Center for the Public Domain and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Creative Commons is based at Stanford Law School, where it shares staff, space, and inspiration with the school’s Center for Internet and Society.

For general information, visit https://creativecommons.org.

For more information about the community development model, visit https://creativecommons.org/discuss.

Contact

Glenn Otis Brown
Executive Director (Palo Alto)
1.650.723.7572 (tel)
1.415.336.1433 (cell)
glenn -AT- creativecommons.org

Neeru Paharia
Assistant Director (Palo Alto)
1.650.724.3717 (tel)
neeru -AT- creativecommons.org

David Wiley
david.wiley -AT- usu.edu
dw2 -AT- opencontent.org