The HOW and WHY for openness in scholarly

publishing and teaching materials

Timothy Vollmer | Stanford School of Medicine Lane Library | October 22, 2014

What should we talk about? •  What’s Creative Commons and why is it useful?

•  What are CC licenses and how do they work?

•  Who uses CC?

•  CC and open access publishing

•  CC and open educational resources

•  Connection between OA and OER

•  Q&A

Nonprofit organizationFree copyright licenses Founded in 2001 Operate worldwide

Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.

The problem: traditional copyright does not work well for sharing and free online collaboration.

•  Supposed to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”

•  Automatic•  in U.S., lasts for life of author + 70 years•  “bundle of rights” = reproduce, make derivative works,

distribute, public performance•  Have to ask permission•  Infringement is expensive ($750-$150k)•  Safety valves (fair use)•  Public domain = no copyright protection•  Facts not protected

Features of copyright today

FAST FWD

With the web,It’s so damn easy to share

But how to ask permission?

How to support those that just want to share?

CC’s solution: A standardized, legally robust way to grant copyright permissions to creative works.

“Lowers transaction costs”

CC’s legal infrastructure: (1) Copyright Licenses (2) Public Domain Tools

(1) CC Copyright Licenses

CC licenses build on traditional copyright•  “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved”

• Gives creators a choice about which freedoms to grant and which rights to keep

• minimizes transaction costs by granting the public certain permissions beforehand

All CC licenses are combinations of 4 elements:

Attribution

ShareAlike

NonCommercial

NoDerivatives

License Building Blocks

http://creativecommons.org/choose/

Creative Commons License Chooser:

Public Domain Dedication

Licenses

Anatomy of a CC License:

(2) Public Domain Tools

CC0 Public Domain Dedication(read “CC Zero”)

Universal waiver, permanently surrenders copyright and related rights, placing the work as nearly as possible into the public domain worldwide

CC Public Domain Mark

Not legally operative, but a label to be used by those with knowledge of a work already in the public domain

Only intended for use with works in the worldwide public domain

75 jurisdictions

500M – 1B works

Who uses Creative Commons?

Wikipedia: Over 77,000 contributors working on over 22 million articles in 285 languages; 23 million files on Commons

FOCUS:OPEN ACCESS

By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

- Budapest Open Access Initiative, February 2002

TWO PATHSGREEN = Repositories

GOLD = Open Access Journals

GREEN = NIH Public Access Policy

GOLD = Public Library of Science

EXAMPLES

Why publish Open Access?•  Aligned with goals of research and

advancement of science and scholarship

•  OA citation advantage; academic authors write to be read

•  “Unexpected readers”; Ability for work to be used in other contexts; if openly licensed allows for translations, use as open educational resources such as Wikipedia

•  Funding mandates require openness/sharing

•  Retain rights to your work

FOCUS:OPEN

EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

- William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

4Rs

Reuse Redistribute Revise Remix

Open Educational Resources

Why publish OERs?•  Cost saving for students; rough estimate is that

CC-licensed open textbooks saved $100M

•  Overcome barriers: language (translations possible), discovery (Google index of CC-licensed content), technical (move content to other formats), cultural (re-use of materials in other teaching contexts and in other parts of world)

•  Increased exposure to teaching/research; coordination with other faculty

Search

Where to find (and share) freely re-usable images?

•  Flickr •  Wikimedia Commons •  Internet Archive •  Digital Public Library of America •  Europeana

Marking

https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking

https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking

•  Attribution: •  Who’s the rightsholder? •  Where does it live online? •  What is the license used?

•  Intended to be flexible •  With 4.0, “in any reasonable manner based

on the medium, means, context” •  For example, put it on a webpage and

provide a link to that page with the image

OA OER

Questions?

Thank you very much! tvol@creativecommons.org