Unencumbered access to public sector information is central to a well-functioning democratic system.

Open Textbooks for Africa Logo, by: Kelsey Wiens, CC BY 4.0 This is a guest blog post written by Kelsey Wiens, founder of Open Textbooks for Africa and public lead for Creative Commons South Africa. On March 11-12, 45 experts from around the world and across South Africa met to discuss opportunities for Open Textbooks…

Laboratory Science—biomedical, by Bill Dickinson, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 April saw lots of activity on the open science front in the European Union. On April 19, the European Commission officially announced its plans to create an “Open Science Cloud”. Accompanying this initiative, the Commission stated it will require that scientific data produced by projects under Horizon 2020…

Image credit Brendan Mruk/Matt Lee, CC BY-SA Today is the International Day Against DRM, a global campaign to raise awareness about the harms of restricting access to legally-acquired content using digital restrictions management (DRM). DRM consists of access control technologies or restrictive licensing agreements that attempt to restrict the use, modification, and distribution of copyright-protected…

Photo by Tirza van Dijk, CC0. A few weeks ago we submitted comments to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) draft federal source code policy. The purpose of the policy is to improve access to custom software code developed for the federal government, and would require that: (1) New custom code whose development is…

On Wednesday in New Orleans, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden spoke at the convening of the American Association for Cancer Research on the need to speed up scientific research, development, and collaboration that can lead to better cancer treatments. Vice President Biden is leading the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, which aims to accelerate cancer research…

In March we hosted the second Institute for Open Leadership, and in our summary of the event we mentioned that the Institute fellows would be taking turns to write about their open policy projects. First up is Amanda Coolidge, Senior Manager of Open Education at BCcampus. I have been in the field of open education…

“eBook” (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by  Jonas Tana    This is a guest blog post written by Alek Tarkowski, Director of Centrum Cyfrowe and co-founder of Creative Commons Poland. On April 14, 2016, 60 experts from 30 countries are meeting in Kraków, Poland for the first OER Policy Forum. The goal of the event is to build on the…

A new Open Education Search App is available as part of the U.S. Department of Education’s #GoOpen campaign, a commitment by 14 states and 40 districts to transition to the use of high-quality, openly-licensed educational resources in their schools. The search app pulls in data from the Learning Registry and works within any Learning Tools Interoperability…

With Creative Commons now being used by people all over the world to openly license over a billion pieces of content, a good working knowledge of what Creative Commons is and how it works is critical. Creative Commons is developing a series of certificates to provide organizations and individuals with a range of options for…