Science Commons Announcements

["Donna Wentworth" <dwentworth AT creativecommons.org>]

Where's the CC in Science Commons?

July 10th, 2008 by dwentworth

When I joined Science Commons last year, that was the question at the core of the queries I got from curious friends. In most cases, they "got" Creative Commons — it was about freeing culture with licenses for the legal sharing and remixing of creative works. Science Commons, they reasoned, must be about freeing science by creating special licenses for sharing and remixing scientific research.

We do work to "free" science — that is, to make it easier to legally share, integrate and remix research and data, with the goal of accelerating discovery. But you won't find any specialized licenses at Science Commons. Indeed, when the goal is integration of open scientific databases published under different jurisdictions, we advise against using licenses of any kind, including the CC-BY license.

So what exactly is Science Commons doing, and where's the CC in it? Glad you asked. Last month, Creative Commons held its first TechSummit, which was graciously hosted by Google. John Wilbanks, who leads Science Commons, gave a short talk on our work, showing what the CC methodology "looks like" in the world of science rather than culture. You can watch the presentation by clicking on part 1 (http://youtube.com/watch?v=I7ku6r3lW2A), which begins with the keynote address by Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito (the Science Commons talk is at 1:05/1:21.53).

Of course, there were lots of other interesting presentations at the TechSummit, which brought together folks from every corner of CC. You can check out the details at the Creative Commons blog, and watch parts 2, 3 and 4 on YouTube.

If you watch the Science Commons presentation and have questions about our mission, methodology or any of our projects, feel free to send us an email. We're happy to provide more detailed information.

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Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org