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  • From: Melissa Reeder <melissa AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: cc-info AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-info] ccNewsletter #11
  • Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 12:03:26 -0800

Dear Creative Commoner,

As we head into a new year, all of us here at CC look forward to the new opportunities, projects, and milestones that lie ahead, just as we look forward to working more closely with you, our community of supporters, advocates, and friends. As you will read in the following news updates, there's a lot going on in the world of CC. We wrapped up 2008 with an immensely successful fundraising campaign, meeting and exceeding our goal by raising a grand total of $525,383.73. We are humbled that so many individual and corporate supporters rallied behind our cause, especially in this troubled economic time, and we owe our success to each and every one of you. We hope you'll continue to give our work meaning by joining with us in building and advocating participatory culture.

Each newsletter we produce is also available in beautifully-designed PDF format, thanks to our CC Philippines team. We're honored to have had such stunning renditions of our newsletters over the past year, and we look forward to CC Philippines' continued artistry. Be sure to check out this and past month's newsletters:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCNewsletter

Best,

Melissa


CC News in Arts and Culture


CC birthday celebration a global success!

Last December, Creative Commoners around the world honored CC's six exceptional years with 14 birthday celebrations that included parties, contests, salons, art and music installations, photography, and more. Our community is vast and growing, and we are delighted that CC's birthday has become an annual opportunity to celebrate participatory culture, innovation, the Commons, and most importantly - the community that has sprung up around them.

Al Jazeera announces launch of free footage under Creative Commons license


On January 13, 2009, Al Jazeera Network announced the world's first repository of broadcast-quality video footage released under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution (CC By 3.0) license. Select Al Jazeera video footage will be available for free to download, share, remix, subtitle and eventually rebroadcast by users and TV stations across the world with acknowledgment to Al Jazeera, marking the first time that video footage produced by a news broadcaster is released under the CC By 3.0 license, which allows for both commercial and non-commercial use. You can access the repository online at http://cc.aljazeera.net.

David Bollier's book, Viral Spiral, available under a Creative Commons license

Public Knowledge cofounder David Bollier's new book Viral Spiral, published by The New Press, is not only available as a free Creative Commons (BY-NC) download, but it will likely establish itself as a definitive guide for those seeking to understand and discover the key players and concepts in the digital commons. If you are looking for a book that both serves as an introduction to and argues for the ideals behind a digital commons, look no further. You can download the book at http://www.viralspiral.cc/ or purchase a hard copy at Amazon or other bookstores.

Nine Inch Nails' CC-licensed album a best-seller

NIN's CC-licensed album, Ghosts I-IV, was the best-selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon.com, giving further proof that CC licenses, can help spur greater awareness, popularity, and financial success within the arts and culture world. This was great news for CC, since NIN's story has garnered a lot of buzz in many online communities.
 
Obama-Biden transition site under a Creative Commons license

As many of you may have been aware, Change.gov, the official Web site of President Obama's transition team, has been using a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY). Even more exciting was the news that the new Whitehouse.gov launched February 20, 2009 with a copyright policy that stipulates all third party content is licensed under CC By. This is a fantastic validation of the importance of CC licenses and the commons, and we look forward to more widespread acceptance of CC licenses and participatory culture in 2009 and beyond.

Creative Commons/GOOD Magazine collaboration

As part of the GOOD December series hosted by GOOD Magazine in Los Angeles from December 5 to December 19, 2008, a live installation of Into Infinity, the CC-licensed art and music project co-produced by dublab and CC, was featured at GOOD's new community space on Melrose Avenue. Creative Director Eric Steuer conducted interviews with Jimmy Wales, Chris Hughes, Chris Dibona, Caterina Fake, Curt Smith, and Joi Ito, which were all released as CC-licensed podcasts over the course of the series.

Follow the latest CC news on CC Blog, Twitter, and Identi.ca

With more and more CC success stories and innovative projects popping up across the globe every day, it has become difficult to keep up with all of them. The Creative Commons blog is the best place for headline stories about all the latest news within the world of the Commons. You can visit or subscribe to our Weblog at http://creativecommons.org/weblog. For news bites in 140 characters or less, CC has begun actively microblogging on Twitter and Identi.ca and both have proven to be great mouthpieces for CC news. With over 1000 followers, these sites have helped strengthen CC's online community, and we invite you to tune in. Links are here: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/10841

Growing a community of active CC users

Heading into 2009, the culture arm of CC will continue to develop its community outreach to active CC users. As more of our licenses spread far and wide, the more possibilities open up for for collaboration and creativity. If you're an active CC license user and have a project you want to let us know about, please get in touch with our Outreach Manager, Fred Benenson whom you can reach at fred AT creativecommons.org.


CC International (CCi)

CCi and Wikimedia Germany now in shared office space


CCi is now housed in a shared workspace with Wikimedia Germany in Berlin-Schöneberg. The move builds upon existing collaborations with local Wikimedia projects and the hope of continued support and unified efforts, especially as Wikimedia/Wikipedia move along in their discussion of releasing wiki content under a CC Attribution Share-Alike license (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Spain's Version 3.0 goes live

Creative Commons Spain and Catalonia, led by Ignasi Labastida i Juan, has successfully completed its versioning of the ported Creative Commons licensing suite to Version 3.0. The six standard Creative Commons licenses are now legally and linguistically adapted to Spanish law and available in Castilian, Catalan, and Basque, with a Galician translation coming soon.

Czech Republic, South Caucasus, Jordan: licenses in public discussion

The draft of CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, adapted to Czech law, is now in public discussion, thanks to the CC Czech team, led by Marek Tichy, Lukáš Gruber, and Petr Jansa, who have been working with CCi to port the CC licensing suite to Czech's copyright law.

Legal experts in the South Caucasus are also making major strides in the Creative Commons license porting process, with the completion of license drafts from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Regional stakeholders are now publicly discussing the three drafts on the CC South Caucasus mailing list.

Public discussion continues for Jordan's license draft, the first in Arabic which, in addition to Al Jazeera's Creative Commons repository, further demonstrates CC's exciting developments in the Middle East.

Anyone is welcome to join in the public discussions (English re-translations of all drafts are provided):
Czech Republic - http://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/cc-czech
South Caucasus - http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-south-caucasus/
Jordan - http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-jo/

Australian census is now under Creative Commons license


As of December 2008, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released all of the content on its Web site (except logos and other trademarked content) under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia license. ABS conducts the annual Australian census and is the holder of all official Australian statistical data, so their acceptance of CC licenses is truly a milestone for Creative Commons, CCi, and Creative Commons Australia.


Science Commons


Ensuring access to research output -- the Research Funding Addendum
This past December, Science Commons released its new industry-standard Research Funding Addendum to members of the funding community for their comments as we move forward in the design process. This Addendum brings together many of the standards, policy recommendations, best practices, and models of scientific collaboration identified by Science Commons and puts them into a form that can be implemented as part of any research grant agreement.

You can find the Funder Addendum on our new Foundation Resource page at <http://sciencecommons.org/resources/funder/>. There you can access our videos, background information, quarterly funder dispatches and more.

Supporting the Commons: Jesse Dylan and Richard Bookman
In December, as part of Creative Commons' annual fundraising campaign, we released Science Commons' first informational video. The video was directed by renowned director Jesse Dylan, the director of the Emmy- award winning "Yes We Can" Barack Obama campaign video with musical artist will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas. The video can be seen on the front of sciencecommons.org.

"I believe Science Commons represents the true aspiration of the web, and I wanted to tell their story," Dylan said. "They've changed the way we think about exploration and discovery; the important and innovative ideas need to be shared.  I believe it's vital to revolutionizing science in the future.  I hope this is just the beginning of our collaboration."

This video was launched in conjunction with a letter of support from Richard Bookman, the Vice Provost for Research and Executive Dean for Research and Research Training at the University of Miami. Our thanks to Jesse Dylan, Professor Bookman, and the broader CC community for their ongoing support.

SEED coins John Wilbanks a 'Game Changer' for Science

<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/11/13/seed-coins-wilbanks-a-game-changer-for-science/>

SEED Magazine has identified John Wilbanks (Vice President of Creative Commons, Science) as a "Game Changer" for science for his work as the head of Science Commons. The piece is part of their "Revolutionary Minds" series, where they profile a chosen few for their advances in a certain area. In the video and accompanying text, John describes the reasoning behind our work and why making the web work for science is important for the world of scientific research.
John joins a group of all-stars, from Carl Bergstrom (creator of the Eigenfactor) to Ilaria Capua (a viroligist known for her avian flu research - especially in making the sequence available to the public via GenBank.) Congratulations to all featured!

The latest from the Data Project

Numerous barriers to the use of scientific data stand in the way of the progress on problems such as the search for cures to disease. These barriers are often as much technical as they are legal and social. The Science Commons Data Project works with scientists struggling with data access and data integration challenges helping them with technical problems and community building, and to understand and anticipate technical and policy needs.

In recent months we've started working with the NIH-sponsored Immunity Portal (ImmPort, http://www.immport.org/) on methods to integrate ("mash up") immunology related data resources for use by scientists studying autoimmune disease. Techniques and resources developed while working with ImmPort will contribute to the development of the Neurocommons as well -- it is thought the immune system is one of the important players in neurological disease. In a second project, initiated in January 2009, we are working with a consortium of infectious disease researchers (http://www.infectiousdiseaseontology.org/Consortium.html) to establish standards and workflow to organize and exploit knowledge around infectious disease. The aim is to liberate scientific knowledge from the scientific articles and clinical records that are currently its primary carriers, making it more accessible and valuable to both human and automated readers, and to show how computations using such open and structured knowledge can advance our understanding of disease mechanism.

Our technical work includes both standards development and implementation. On the standards front we are pleased to announce that Science Commons has been midwife to the launch in January of a "Shared Names" Steering Committee (http://sharedname.net/) charged with nurturing communication about biomedicine by creating standard names (identifiers or "URIs") for important objects residing in public reference databases. The names will help to link up research resources provided by the projects that have signed up to the committee. Seven leaders in e-Science and the Semantic Web from the US, UK, and Canada have committed to the effort.

Representing significant progress on another standards front, the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) OWL Working Group recently announced a move to "last call" for a set of technical specifications for version 2 of OWL, an extension of the W3C's OWL Web Ontology Language. OWL serves as a standard in the ontology community and the new documents are on track to becoming W3C recommendations. This is a tremendous accomplishment in the ontology community, and Science Commons's Alan Ruttenberg played a critical role in orchestrating it. The expected issue date for these recommendations will be shortly after the comment period closes on January 23.

We are also pleased to announce a technical advance that comes to us thanks to our friends at OpenLink Software. The Neurocommons distribution, a set of information sources that have been "ported" to our prototype platform for data integration, can now be provisioned for use in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Custom loads of the distribution enable users to manage availability, selection and combination of content, and resource utilization according to their own needs. This is another step toward converting data curation and integration from an expensive, artisanal process to a systematic one making use of commodity hardware and software.


ccLearn

"What status for open?" Paper published

We are very excited about the recent publication of a year-long research endeavor entitled, "What status for open? An examination of the licensing policies of open educational organizations and projects." The report, published last month and available at http://learn.creativecommons.org/cclearn-reports, asks, "What makes an educational resource "open"? Is it enough that resources are available on the World Wide Web free of charge, or does openness require something more?"

With the support of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, ccLearn surveyed the copyright licensing policies of several hundred educational projects or organizations on the Internet to assess whether these legal conditions limit the usefulness of self-designated open resources from the user's perspective.

We won't dive into the details of the report here, but the basic gist of what we found is this:

Most of the open educational resource (OER) sites in our study were licensed under a Creative Commons or other standard license. However, a good chunk of these sites had terms of use that were confusing or difficult to understand, and a smaller chunk had crafted their own licenses---further complicating matters. After months of digging through and analyzing this stuff, we came up with some recommendations for all of you out there wanting to publish OER on the web.

In particular, we recommend that you consider using the Creative Commons Attribution-only license (CC BY). Why? Because it allows the most flexibility for potential users to adapt, combine, and recontribute your work back to the pool of OER, thereby increasing quality of educational resources available for all to share. For more info, see our first follow-up document to the report--Supplement 1.0 - Key considerations for licensing your open educational resources on the Internet-- at http://learn.creativecommons.org/cclearn-reports.

Inside OER: An interview with the authors of Collaborative Statistics

We recently interviewed Susan Dean and Barbara Illowsky, co-authors of the popular statistics textbook, Collaborative Statistics. The textbook is widely used in community colleges and was recently licensed under CC BY. After being in use for 15 years, the two decided to obtain the rights back from the publisher so that they could make it freely available to students everywhere. Their path to open licensing is related in Inside OER (http://learn.creativecommons.org/projects/inside-oer), a ccLearn series featuring interesting projects and people in open education. The Connexions project (Rice University) now hosts the textbook on their site in modular form, so that you are free to use, improve, and remix any or all of its components.

ccLearn Powering up for 2009


We have many things in the pipeline for 2009. The research report (What status for open?) was major, and that came out just before the new year. We're now working on follow-up documents and media for exploring specific aspects of the report in more depth. For example, interoperability of open educational resources is a huge issue that needs to be addressed, cutting across legal, technical, and social dimensions. Are OER machine-readable so that teachers and students can find them easily via search engines? Right now, Creative Commons licenses are the only machine-readable licenses. This puts ccLearn in an excellent position to really engage and grapple with the interoperability issue, in addition to others--like the pros and cons of the Share-Alike licenses.

We're also set to produce a white paper and call to action for the Universal Education Search, which has been live in beta form for a while at http://uesearch.creativecommons.org/search/. Our report will detail what we did, why we did it, and where we expect it to go. We hope this transparency will open up doors for future work - we want to encourage others to take our ideas and methods and move them forward.

OpenEd Community Site

We are also in the midst of designing a community site for open education stake-holders and newbies. This site will emphasize community--providing a space for us to interact and share ideas and resources that will help to fuel the open education movement. We are delighted to be working with White Whale, a capable consulting, design, and development company, who has already given us great feedback on the purpose and structure of the site.

We invite you to check back on the ccLearn site, or just subscribe to the blog! ccLearn's vision is to make CC licensing for educators (and students) accessible and easy. We want people to know that education is free, and that open education can be just as good, in fact better, than all the stuff we currently pay an arm and a leg for. Don't hesitate to contact us! Our eyes and ears are constantly open to new ideas, for improvement or otherwise, and for interesting collaborative opportunities. Stop by and check it out: http://learn.creativecommons.org/

=============
We rely on our supporters to continue our work enabling
stories like those listed above. Check it out --

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This newsletter is licensed under
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ -- please share
and remix!

Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the
generous support of organizations including the Center for the
Public Domain, the Omidyar Network, The Rockefeller Foundation,
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as members of
the public.

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Creative Commons newsletters are also posted in PDF format to the CC Weblog.  For back issues please visit http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCNewsletter



  • [cc-info] ccNewsletter #11, Melissa Reeder, 02/03/2009

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