Act now to stop the FCC from rolling back fundamental protections for the open internet! Net neutrality is under attack…again. On the day before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai released a draft plan that would repeal net neutrality in the United States. Net neutrality is the principle that internet…

In September 2016 the European Commission released its proposed changes to copyright in the EU. Unfortunately, the proposal fails to deliver on the promise for a modern copyright law in Europe. Creative Commons is a founding member of  the Communia Association, which has been hard at work advocating for positive changes to the Commission’s plan.…

Read the Global Open Policy Report Open Policy is when governments, institutions, and non-profits enact policies and legislation that makes content, knowledge, or data they produce or fund available under a permissive license to allow reuse, revision, remix, retention, and redistribution. This promotes innovation, access, and equity in areas of education, data, software, heritage, cultural…

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…

This is a guest post by Lisette Kalshoven. On Monday, January 25th COMMUNIA organized a Public Domain Day celebration at the European Parliament. COMMUNIA advocates for policies that expand the public domain and increase access to and reuse of culture and knowledge, and consists of many organisations including Creative Commons, Kennisland and Centrum Cyfrowe. The…

In October we wrote that the U.S. Department of Education (ED) is considering an open licensing requirement for direct competitive grant programs. If adopted, educational resources created with ED grant funds will be openly licensed for the public to freely use, share, and build upon. The Department of Education has been running a comment period in which interested parties can provide…

Today Creative Commons and 22 other organizations published a letter urging the publishing giant Elsevier to alter its newly revised policy regarding the sharing and hosting of academic articles so that it better supports access to scholarly research. Elsevier’s new policy, announced 30 April 2015, is detrimental to article authors as well as those seeking…

Vancouver Foundation has announced that it will adopt an open licensing policy by January 2017. The foundation will require that all projects and research funded through community advised grant programs be licensed and shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY). In addition, the foundation has pledged to license their own intellectual…

Today Creative Commons joins over 50 organizations in releasing the Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age. The declaration is a collaboratively-created set of principles that outlines core legal and technical freedoms that are necessary for researchers to be able to take advantage of new technologies and practices in the pursuit of scholarly…

Ross Mounce, a postdoc at the University of Bath, recently wrote about how Elsevier charged him $31.50 for an “open access” research article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (BY-NC-ND) license. Mounce was understandably upset, because the article was originally published by another publisher – John Wiley  – and was made available freely on their…