PeerJ Founders Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt / Duncan Hull / CC BY In their excellent Washington Post opinion piece, Matt Cooper and Elizabeth Wiley suggest that federally funded research should be freely accessible over the Internet. They argue that when students lose their access to academic databases after graduation, society doesn’t get the same…

Ms. Catherine Ngugi.. and Letuimanu’asina Dr. Emma KRUSE VA’AI / Mariana Bittencourt / CC BY Through the generous support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and in full partnership with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), UNESCO hosted the 2012 World Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress last week to: showcase the world’s best practices in…

Bassel / joi / CC BY On March 15, 2012, Bassel Khartabil was detained in a wave of arrests in the Mazzeh district of Damascus. Since then, his family has received no official explanation for his detention or information regarding his whereabouts. However, his family has recently learned from previous detainees at the security branch…

Some of you may have heard about a School of Open, especially if you follow us on Twitter/Identi.ca/Facebook, or if you’re already a part of the P2PU community and follow their blog. Whether you have or not, the School of Open is still very much a concept, and one which we invite you to join…

Some of these developments may be dated by a month or more, but we want to make sure they are on your radar by pointing them out here. Several open data portals have launched, including a Brazilian Open Data portal powered by the open-source data cataloguing software CKAN (run by the Open Knowledge Foundation –…

The 2012 World Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress is kicking off tomorrow in Paris, France. Organized by UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), the World OER Congress will encourage more governments to adopt policies that include OER and will bring together Ministers of Education/Human Resource Development, senior policy makers, expert practitioners, researchers, students and…

Elinor Ostrom / Prolineserver 2010 / Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA A collective sigh of sadness went around the Creative Commons community yesterday when we heard that Elinor Ostrom passed away. Elinor is greatly admired for her pioneering studies on the governance of common-pool resources (the Commons) and collective action across the fields of economics,…

Stay up to date with CC news by subscribing to our weblog and following us on Twitter. Report from "What the World Bank's Open Access Policy Means for Development" panel The World Bank hosted an event called What the World Bank’s Open Access Policy Means for Development. Participants included Peter Suber from Harvard University, Michael…

On Monday, the World Bank hosted an event called What the World Bank’s Open Access Policy Means for Development (you can view the video recording of the event at the link or embedded below). Participants included Peter Suber from Harvard University, Michael Carroll from American University (Mike is on the Board of Directors at Creative…

Recently, Andrés Guadamuz from CC Costa Rica was in Geneva at the 9th session of the Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP) at WIPO. Andrés has represented Creative Commons over the past few years at WIPO. CDIP was established in 2008 and deals with intellectual property issues relevant to developing nations. CC gained permanent…