Image by Ilya Pavlov, CC0. Last week the White House finalized the Federal Source Code Policy to improve access to software code developed by or for the federal government. The policy is a step in the right direction toward making software accessible and reusable across U.S. government agencies, as well as for the general public.…

    Yesterday, Creative Commons joined the U.S. Department of Education (ED) for a series of important announcements that will advance OER in grades PreK-12 across the United States. ED announced the launch of its #GoOpen campaign to encourage states, school districts and educators to use Open Educational Resources (OER). OER, made “open” by CC…

Yesterday the Obama administration released an updated version of its Open Government National Action Plan. Ever since the launch of the global Open Government Partnership in 2011, participating nations have made commitments to work on initiatives “to promote transparency, increase civic participation, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to make government more open, effective, and accountable.”…

White House by Diego Cambiaso, available under the CC BY-SA license. Today, Creative Commons and a broad coalition of education, library, technology, public interest, and legal organizations are calling upon the White House to take administrative action to ensure that federally funded educational materials are made available as Open Educational Resources (OER) for the public…

Seal of the United States Office of Scienceand Technology Policy / Public Domain Today, the White House issued a Directive supporting public access to publicly-funded research. John Holdren, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, “has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published…

This week, open access advocates in the United States and around the world are rallying around a petition that urges public access to publicly funded research. The petition is now live on Whitehouse.gov’s We the People platform: Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research. We believe in the…

In November we wrote that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was soliciting comments on two related Requests for Information (RFI). One asked for feedback on how the federal government should manage public access to scholarly publications resulting from federal investments, and the other wanted input on public access to the…

In the U.S., the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has released two Requests for Information (RFI) soliciting public input on long term preservation of and public access to the results of federally funded research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications. The deadline for responding to the RFIs is January 2,…

HASTAC’s third annual Digital Media and Learning Competition launched yesterday, an initiative supported by the MacArthur Foundation. Last year‘s theme was participatory learning, and CC Learn was awarded a grant for Student Journalism 2.0—a pilot initiative “engaging high school students in understanding the legal and technical issues intrinsic to new and evolving journalistic practices.” The…

President Obama announced yesterday the American Graduation Initiative, a twelve billion dollar plan to reform U.S. community colleges. The initiative calls for five million additional community college graduates by 2020, and plans that “increase the effectiveness and impact of community colleges, raise graduation rates, modernize facilities, and create new online learning opportunities” to aid this…