Authors Alek Tarkowski Carolina Botero Delia Browne Jessica Smith Kelsey Wiens Laura Mora María Juliana Soto Nancy Salem Nicole Allen Tomoaki Watanabe Tomohiro Nagashima
License CC-BY-4.0
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Global Open Policy Report
2016
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Editors
Kelsey Wiens, Alek Tarkowski
Authors:
Africa & Middle East: Kelsey Wiens - CC Canada,
Nancy Salem - Access to Knowledge for Development
Center
Asia: Tomohiro Nagashima, Tomoaki Watanabe -
CommonSphere
Australia: Delia Browne, Jessica Smith - Australia
National Copyright Unit, Baden M Appleyard
Latin America: Carolina Botero, María Juliana Soto,
Laura Mora - Karisma Foundation
Europe: Alek Tarkowski - Centrum Cyfrowe
North America: Nicole Allen - SPARC
Copyeditor: Isla Haddow-Flood
Graphics: Joanna Tarkowska / Atramento.pl
Project Host: Centrum Cyfrowe
Project Manager: Kelsey Wiens
Survey: CommonSphere
Global Open Policy Report is made possible by a
generous grant from The William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation and a subgrant from Open Policy Network.
Global Open Policy Report 2016 is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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Introduction
There’s been a civic re-awakening around the idea that the public should have better
access to the research outputs, educational content, and cultural heritage materials
that its tax dollars create. Imagine what would be possible with broad, open access to
publicly funded cancer research, crucial open data on climate change, and innovative
career education and training materials.
Right now, this is not the case. Interesting and useful digital content developed
through the generosity of public investment remains locked up by restrictive
intellectual property laws, antiquated procurement processes, and incumbent
commercial companies who want to protect their dying business models.
There’s a massive opportunity for our society to leverage the near-zero marginal costs
of digital copying and the incredible connective potential of the Internet to increase
access to knowledge, improve educational opportunities, and help solve some of the
world’s toughest scientific challenges.
To do this, we need to work to develop smart, forward-looking public policies that flip
the default from a closed, proprietary system to an open, participatory, and
collaborative one.
There have already been some interesting and impactful policy changes, as will be
explored more in this report. But we have a long way to go. Positive policy change is
not inevitable. It requires committed advocates, open-minded policymakers, and
ongoing public pressure and support for systemic changes that will improve access and
opportunities for everyone. Let’s do it, together.
Tim Vollmer
Public Policy Manager, Creative Commons
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Africa
Africa is vast. Within it, there are countries with long standing policies and a rich
history of open policies. However, there are many countries with very little to no
institutional open policies or national open policies at all. Discussions around
copyright, IP and access are often set aside for issues around inequality, health and
poverty.
South Africa continues to be the leader in open policies both at an institutional level
and government level, but Kenya, Ghana, Ethiopia and Nigeria has had successful buy
in and are expected to grow in open policy in the next decade. Global funders,
institutions and organisations have invested heavily across Africa by supporting
capacity building with UNESCO, EIFL, and the Hewlett Foundation representing some
of the largest investments in open policy support and capacity building so far.
The Open Access movement has had the largest impact in Africa compared to the
activities of other policies. There are 22 countries across the continent that now have
Open Access repositories including Algeria, Botswana, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Egypt,
Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda,
Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The
leaders in Open Access, South Africa, has 24 institutions with Open Access
repositories. Kenya has 20 institutions similarly represented.
There are Creative Commons teams across Africa, and Code for Africa has 4 country
specific projects. The University of Cape Town-based ROER4D are doing tremendous
work showing the impact of OER not only in Africa but across the planet in developing
nations. Wikipedians across Africa have been bolstered through projects activated by
the WikiAfrica movement, and the South African-based Wiki Loves Women project
launched in 2016 across four countries – Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria
– and are growing as a movement, in partnership with the Goethe-Institut. The Wiki
Loves Africa project similarly has activated focus events in 18 countries over the last
two years. WikiZero is the zero rated, or no cost, access to Wikipedia; and the
WikiFundi software, that will enable offline editing of Wikipedia, is due to be launched
towards the end of 2016. The Knight Foundation has made a strong investment in the
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future of data journalism on the continent releasing US$4.7million to Code 4 Africa.
Code 4 Africa has also launched the continent's largest repository of open data in the
form of openAFRICA.
Meanwhile government and institutions reduce the traction of open policy across
Africa. There are multiple issues challenging the region including technology deficits,
outdated intellectual property laws, and health, poverty and inequality issues that
occupy the government's legislative agenda.
Key policies
There have been a number of successes in open policy across the continent. Open Data
continues to be a major stipulation to funders and a motivator to governments looking
to support their decisions with data. The African Development Bank Group’s project
Open Data for Africa believes that “if the fight against poverty is to be won there must
be improvements in the quality and the quantity of statistical data across Africa”. The
ADBG works with partners that include the World Bank, International Monetary Fund,
PARIS21 and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Their projects have
included, road network improvement in Gabon, the promotion of land rights of forest
communities in the Congo Basin, and poverty reduction through action for Women in
Chad.
The Council on Higher Education in South Africa announced in a White Paper for Post-
School Education and Training in January 2014 that there will be support and funding for
the collaborative creation of open learning resources across institutions in South
Africa. The white paper included a provision for the creation of a licensing framework
for open resources and provides support for open source software.
In response to the white paper, the University of South Africa (UNISA) approved an
Open Education Resource Strategy in March 2014. UNISA’s strategy is noteworthy
because of the size of institution. UNISA has over 350,000 students, which makes it
larger then the Open University in the UK. It is also the longest-standing distance
university in the world and is historically important because it provided higher
education to the apartheid political prisoners on Robben Island, including Nelson
Mandela. Mandela was UNISA’s first alumni to become president of South Africa.
UNISA’s Open Education Resource Strategy was developed between 2014 to 2016
and is broken into 5 major strategic priorities. These are the:
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1. Development of an effective management system for intellectual property;
2. Establishment of an open licensing framework;
3. Systematic integration of high quality, available OER as appropriate into
courses and their subsequent release for use by others;
4. Contribution to the global OER repository of resources; and
5. Evaluation and review of institutional policies to incorporate OER values and
processes.
Identify challenges
OER is now becoming the mainstream – supplanting Open Access; although the
challenges remain much the same. Costs to adopt Gold Open Access remain far too
high for most African researchers, with journal costs remaining excessively high for
libraries across the continent. Alternatives like the Gates Foundation mandating Open
Access to all will impact the availability of journal articles to African institutions. There
is less positive outlook on the use of OERs in developing nations due to perceptions in
quality, the threat of OER to systems, and the organisational structures and individual
educators ideas of OERs adding to their already overloaded workloads.
Knowledge and access to ICTs remains one of the major challenges to Open Policy
being adopted in Africa. Limited connectivity, low levels of digital literacy and
geographical remoteness further divide inequalities and marginalise vulnerable groups
across Africa. For OERs, for adoption to continue there needs to be a heavy investment
in print and mobile options, and options that do not require constant connectivity.
Irene Onyancha of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa presented on
challenges of achieving the Post 2015 SDGs in Africa. In her paper titled, ‘Challenges of
Achieving the Post: 2015 SDGs in African Societies’, she focused on challenges such as
the right of access to information, developing access to information legislation,
supporting open information environments, access to ICT infrastructure and Public
libraries as the information service providers.
Identify opportunities for growth.
With the launch of SPARC Africa, there is the anticipation of additional support for
Open Access in Africa. SPARC Africa “will prioritise creating a development forum,
which will assist with capacity building and infrastructure to open up the African
continent’s scholarly output; making it accessible and discoverable for the
international community. The Chapter will create this developmental forum, by
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tapping into the Ubuntu nature, which is an [southern] African [philosophy] meaning,
'humanity to others' ”. The Global OER conference, Open Education Global, will be
hosted in Cape Town in 2017 and will also coincide with the 10th anniversary of the
Cape Town Education Declaration.
In East Africa, the Kenya Institute for Curriculum Reform (KICD) is a government
institution that is looking at developing open policies. During 2016 they are working on
a major curriculum overhaul of Early Childhood Development (ECD), Primary,
Secondary and Special Needs Education. With the ED10 Consortium they are looking
at developing policies that will make it easy for education practitioners to adopt, and
develop open educational resources for schools.
MENA Region
The call for openness globally has been increasingly felt in the Middle East and North
Africa. While there have been several promising instances of open policy initiatives,
the region as a whole continues to face challenges in developing comprehensive open
policies. A few countries have taken the lead in open government policy, with almost all
countries exhibiting some activity – many times through online open government data
portals or pages. Advocates have continued to argue for a change in attitude towards
openness, highlighting the importance of participation by civil society and citizens.
In the region, there is varying legislation in regards to openness. Three countries,
Yemen, Jordan and Tunisia, have in place Freedom of Information legislation, to
different effects; while Morocco and Lebanon have both developed draft laws. Other
countries may have provisions on access to information, for specific sectors or actors
in other laws. Much of this legislation, however, remains fragmented, and often does
not subscribe to common standards of openness, particularly in practice. Similarly,
many have noted that online portals are not frequently updated or easy to navigate.
One notable initiative is Qatar’s Open Data Policy, which requires government bodies
to release non-confidential raw data online, overseen by the Ministry of Information
Technology, ictQatar. Another notable initiative is in Tunisia, which was the 2015
Africa recipient in the Open Government Partnership Awards for an online system
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that opens up public procurement procedures. The Ministry of Finance in the United
Arab Emirates has also been praised for publishing its annual budget in an accessible
excel format. Currently, Jordan and Tunisia are the only members of the international
Open Government Partnership, where participating governments must endorse an
open government declaration and devise and a country action plan.
Civil society has also played its part in supporting openness and making use of open
government data across the region. One example is Mwazna, an Egyptian initiative,
that uses data from the annual budgets to create comprehensible visualisations on
government spending and finance.
Case Studies
Code for Africa
Code for Africa currently has initiatives in Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and
Kenya with projects planned during 2016 in Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania,
Tunisia, and Uganda. Code for Africa are funded by the Knight Foundation with an
investment of US$4.7million. The project intends to make a large impact on data
journalist in the region. With this in mind they have launched the continent’s largest
repository of open data, openAFRICA which is to create a “Library of Congress of Data
for African for use by Citizens, Media, Activists, Governments and Civil Society”.
Kenya’s successful project and West Africa’s largest news site, SaharaReporters,
partnered with Code for Nigeria to launch the Dodgy Doctors tool. A survey carried out
in Nigeria found that more than 50% of the population had received 'treatment' from
‘quacks’ or unlicensed individuals posing as doctors. These ‘quacks’ treat everything
from malaria or pregnancy to typhoid.
Using the Dodgy Doctor, users can easily check if their doctor is properly registered and
in good standing with Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN). The tool also
allows citizens to check the accurate costs of prescription drugs and find the closest
hospital. The tool empowers users by allowing them to report ‘doctors’ whose names
are not on the database. These reports are then followed up by a journalist from
SaharaReporter and the MDCN’s Inspectorate.
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In January 2016 Code for Africa launched impactAFRICA. impactAFRICA is a
US$500,000 fund offered for data driven investigative projects. Currently impact
AFRICA is taking applications from six African countries: Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South
Africa, Tanzania and Zambia. “We will help newsrooms use data and digital tools to
produce the type of hard-hitting reportage and compelling storytelling that shapes
public discourse and gets the attention of policymakers,” says impactAFRICA manager
Haji Mohamed Dawjee.
Key links:
• https://medium.com/code-for-africa/impactafrica-data-journalism-fund-kicks-
off-with-call-for-investigative-proposals-33312b205052#.oi7rfi3g0
• https://medium.com/code-for-africa/your-doctor-is-a-con-artist-
e9e9e066d385#.w7bcenz8n
• http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/africainvestigates/2014/11/nigeria-
fake-doctors-20141126132723604457.html
• https://africaopendata.org/
African Storybook Project
The vision for the African Storybook Project (ASb) is “Open access to picture
storybooks in the languages of Africa. For children’s literacy, enjoyment and
imagination.” The literacy rate across sub-Saharan Africa for individuals over 15 years
of age is 64.0% (2015). The key obstacles to improving literacy is the lack of
interesting, enjoyable, age-appropriate stories for early readers in languages that are
familiar to them. Current publishing models are unable or unwilling to provide a variety
of books to address children's needs.
In 2013, the South African Institute for Distance Education (Saide) launched the
African Storybook project funded by ComicRelief UK. The ASb is a website-based
platform that allows children to easily find enjoyable stories in their mother-tongue.
The platform allows all stories to be translated, adapted to different reading levels,
downloaded, printed or used on mobile devices. Further, it provides children and
adults alike the ability to upload and easily create new stories.
As of April 2016 there are more than 500 unique stories in 70 of the languages spoken
in Africa, including English, French, and Portuguese. Taking into account the translated
versions, there are over 2500 stories in the ASb collection.
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ASb sees open source publishing as key to facilitating multilingual literacy
development in Africa. They use Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 International as their
default licence. SAb has a mix of SAb commissioned stories and newly written
individual stories. In those instances where stories have been previously published by
organisations or individuals who are not willing to risk for-profit publishers financially
benefiting from their work, they can choose a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International licence. This
use of the more restrictive licence is a rarity.
In 2015 an exciting independent project, the “Global African Storybook”, sprung up
with researchers at the University of British Columbia. The “Global African Storybook”
project has the goal of translating the open-license ASb works into non-African
languages so that African stories, lessons and adventures can be enjoyed by children all
over the world.
The Global African Storybook Project found that many children stories cross regions,
languages and hemispheres. For example, that stories found in Mozambique resonate
with children speaking Creole. The “Global African Storybook” project’s focus on
“minority and endangered languages provide other examples where children’s
literature can be extremely difficult to find.”
Anyone can participate by translating existing stories using a super simple translator
tool or creating new ones in the same spirit of sharing, literacy, and open access as the
African Storybook Project.
Key links:
• http://www.africanstorybook.org/
• http://global-asp.github.io/about/
• http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/E291%20Cape%20To
wn%20Publication_A4_FINAL_web.pdf
• http://data.uis.unesco.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=EDULIT_DS&popupcusto
mise=true&lang=en#
EIFL Electronic Information for Libraries
The Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) continues to have strong reach across
Africa. EIFL Africa ensures that libraries stay engaged and up-to-date in movements
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including Open Data, Open Access and affordable access to ICTs. EIFL actively works
in 16 countries across Africa including Angola, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Congo,
Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania,
Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
Recently, EIFL has reviewed the perception of public libraries in six countries: Ethiopia,
Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe. The key findings were that “most
people believe public libraries have the potential to contribute to community
development in important areas such as health, employment and agriculture. However,
libraries are small and under-resourced, and most people associate them with
traditional book lending and reference services, rather than innovation and
technology.”
Since 20008, EIFL has been operating in Kenya, working in partnership with the Kenya
Libraries and Information Services Consortium (KLISC). KLISC has an active
membership of over 100 members including university libraries, college and
polytechnic libraries, research libraries, national libraries, and special libraries.
Through advocacy, partnership and capacity building, EIFL has supported the national
and institutional open access awareness, which has resulted in the launch of a number
of open access repositories across the country, including the globally recognised
institutions: The University of Nairobi, Kenyatta University, and Jomo Kenyatta
University of Agriculture and Technology. All three universities have now introduced
open access mandates.
The University of Nairobi recently adopted an Open Access policy and successfully
launched their Open Access repository, which as of March 2015, has more than 76,000
new documents. Not only does Open Access allow students more access to knowledge,
but it is ‘opening up a wealth of knowledge from Kenyan researchers to the world’.
“When we get to a point where we are restricting access to information we are denying
part of the populations their right to develop. Their right to advance themselves,” says
medical student Nicholas Matuku at the University of Nairobi.
Once their policy was established, the library at University of Nairobi began mentoring
smaller institutions. EIFL and the University of Nairobi instigated an 18-month project
that advocated for the adoption of Open Access policies and increased knowledge of
accessibility to repositories. Now rural Kenyan doctors are using sources like PubMed
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Central to have immediate, online, free and unrestricted availability to medical
knowledge.
Key links:
• http://www.eifl.net/country/kenya
• http://www.eifl.net/resources/perceptions-public-libraries-africa-0
• http://eifl.net/blogs/power-open-access
• http://eifl.net/blogs/video-university-nairobi-opens-their-research-world
Open Book Project in Saudi Arabia
The Open Book Project was built to support the benefits of Open Education to the
Arab world by expanding access to free, high-quality Open Education materials in
Arabic, with a focus on science and technology.
In 2014 a select group of fellows from the MENA region went to the USA for three
weeks to visit organisations that are involved in OER work. This trip was followed by a
small team of OER experts from the USA and Canada visiting a select subset of the
Open Book Project fellows in MENA countries to assess what had happened once the
fellow’s had returned home. The visitors were also able to make additional
recommendations related to the OER projects they had initiated. This included visits to
Open Book Project fellows in Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
A follow-on convention was held in December 2014 in Sharjah in the United Arab
Emirates at the ALECSO-sponsored Arab Forum for Scientific Research and
Sustainable Development. Almost all the original Open Book Project participants
attended, and have built up a strong collaborative network.
The objectives of the Open Book Project are to:
• Implement open licensing in the MENA region that enables anyone to use,
adapt, and share these education materials;
• Build partnerships between the US and MENA region to make learning
materials open, free, and connected to Arab educators, students, and
classrooms;
• Lower the geographic, economic, and gender-based barriers to learning;
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• Create Open Education Resources that anyone with access to the Internet can
read, download, and print for free, or adapt to meet the local needs of their
classrooms or education systems;
• Provide high-quality, college-level science open textbooks in Arabic;
• Support professors and intellectuals while they create their own open courses;
• Explore and support the benefits of OER for governments, institutions,
faculties, students and the public, specifically examining how OER affects
teaching and learning practices including the inter-relationships and synergy of
OER with open access, open data, open policy, open science; and
• Create a community network of OER practitioners across the MENA region
that communicate and collaborate with each other.
Saudi Arabia has contracted with Creative Commons HQ to finalise their OER policy
and future outcomes are anticipated in 2016. One of the great outcome of Open Book
Project was the creation of CC Lebanon by one of the Open Book project fellows.
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Asia
Asia is probably one of the more challenging regions when it comes to regional
networking, due to its geography and diversity. Diverse languages, a number of
countries being surrounded by the sea, and differing levels of development are some of
the hurdles to forming an in-region network around a shared interest. The boundary of
the area is less commonly perceived. East, South East, and South Asia often interact
and network thematically in open movements, it seems. But the CIS countries in
Central Asia, and Near and Middle Eastern countries could be called West Asia.
International policy or political networks rarely cover all of these, except perhaps the
Asian Cooperation Dialogues. ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations),
SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation), and EAS (East Asia
Summit) are some of the examples of international networks covering only a part of
the region. It is not rare to witness that international frameworks and classifications
involving Asian countries also involve countries in adjacent regions, such as the Arab
League involving North African countries, or some Asia-Pacific frameworks involving
East Asian and Pacific countries. The International Telecommunications Union, for
example, employs regional categories involving countries in Asia and neighboring
regions, such as Asia, Pacific and Arab Countries, for some of its statistics. This type of
issue exists for other regions, but Asia experiences it more than others. Faced with this
diversity and lack of coherence, this section relies on many international indexes and
organisations to build an understanding of the state of the affairs of the region.
Regardless, it is possible to see that the open movement is taking place in many
countries in multiple ways. There are a wide range of Creative Commons affiliate
teams that exist in Asia. These are Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Hong
Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Philippines,
Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam. Some of these were created in the early 2000’s.
Others, like Mongolia, are newly emerging.
Aligned open movement organisations like Wikimedia Chapters, Open Knowledge
Foundation offices, and FabLabs also exist across the region. Wikimedia chapters exist
in Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Indonesia, India, Israel, and Taiwan. Open Knowledge
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Foundation chapters and local groups exist in Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong,
Indonesia, India, Japan, South Korea, Nepal, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Taiwan.
FabLabs exist in Afghanistan, China, Indonesia, Japan, Myanmar, Vietnam, Singapore,
South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand.
Open Government Partnerships have several participating countries. These are
Armenia, Indonesia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and South Korea. There are
Open Education Consortium member institutions in many countries, most notably
Afghanistan, China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Pakistan, Singapore, South
Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. CODATA’s national members include China, Japan, India,
Indonesia, Mongolia, and South Korea.
Given that they are not necessarily close to each other, nor share a common language,
ethnicity, religion, or other elements, it is perhaps natural that there are no
overarching policy initiatives at a regional level. They also do not necessarily learn
from each other. It is worth repeating that each country’s development level (and
therefore focus) varies dramatically, with some countries still combatting such issues
as illiteracy and electrification, while others focus on making advances in knowledge-
intensive industries.
Key policies
Implemented and in development – the successes and pitfalls of the current policies
Key open policies are difficult to identify, but in general, online data provision is
happening in many countries and across many areas of data. If and when open licensing
happens, these practices would become Open Data. Open policies often face the
question of effects or returns on investments. Even with strong political leadership,
evidence of success has the potential to influence sustaining the practice after
leadership change, increasing the commitment and scope of practice, etc.
One pitfall with Open Data is that proper measurement of its impact is not easy. While
there are a number of studies looking into the economic effects of Open Data, the level
of specificity for each country from those studies may turn out to be unsatisfactory to
maintain the level of commitment required for an Open Data policy and its
implementation. Open Data is the one open policy that is expected to directly generate
economic benefits to society. Yet the use of Open Data for commercial use is not easy
to track, and the resulting economic benefits are difficult to assess. Some countries
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find anecdotal success cases using Open Data, but it seems that not every country
finds one.
Taiwan’s first place ranking in global Open Data is an impressive example. It is notable
that, like UK and the US, a broader political movement has encouraged strong political
leadership to enhance transparency. This kind of success indicates that the top-down
approach works with Open Data policies. Politically, across Asia, there are some
governments who are not that keen on embracing openness and change, and not all
political uprisings end well. Demand for popular empowerment, transparency, or a
stronger democracy could result in suppression.
Key trends
Without access to a region-wide view on the current state of affairs, we must resort to
using trends as the indication of a proliferation of data provision, that can be observed
in the Open Data Index and Open Data Barometer. These global surveys indicate that
the practice of providing government-held data sets is common to many countries
around the world, including Asian countries. Open licensing is still not done in many
countries, making these practices not quite “open” data, but data availability indicates
some level of government policy.
Identify challenges
One major challenge for some of the countries in Asia is infrastructure. Such things as
electricity, network infrastructure, literacy, or even solutions to military conflicts and
severe poverty may need to take precedence before, say, open educational resources
can make a difference in some countries or part of the countries. Another is the
orientation for transparency. Availability of the Internet is still limited in some
countries – including some large-sized countries such as India and Bangladesh. This
means that entities converting the networked information resources to provide access
for the world of the unconnected are important. In order to deliver the benefits of
Open Education, Open Data, or other openness policies targeting those people.
Culture and politics may work as another challenge in some countries. There are many
Asian countries placed in the lower section of the press freedom index, and rated low
on assessment pertaining to the rule of law, control of corruption, and absence of
violence. In some of those countries, if Open Data is seen as a tool to increase
transparency, it may face difficulty gaining substantial support.
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It should also be noted that the awareness of copyright usually goes hand in hand with
open polices – when learners, educators, scientists, data analysts, and others think that
information resources are generally not able to be used without breaking copyright
law. In these societies, the demand for open licensing of these resources becomes
strong. However, some Asian countries do not have such strong awareness, which
often means that compliance of copyright law is also weak.
Identify opportunities for growth
One major opportunity for the advancement of open policies within the region lies
with the policies of large countries such as India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan,
and the Philippines. Asia, as a region, is host to the most countries with more than 100
million people. Once rollout is effected, the numbers of beneficiaries of Open
Education in those countries will be sizable. Except perhaps for Japan, where access to
education has never been a major concern. Asia is arguably the highest-potential
region for Open Education with the greatest number of potential learners who can
benefit from extra education. Some of the more developed countries are well placed
for Open Data and Open Science as innovation policies.
Open Heritage is still a nascent area of open policy, but one way to see its potential in
Asia is that the region hosts more than 2000 living languages (according to
Ethnologue). Diversity in language means that there are many potential heritages to be
recorded, archived, published, and reused. More than 800 languages are classified as
“in trouble” or “dying” within the region.
Case Studies
Open Education in India
India was one of the first counties in the world to embrace the importance of OER,
based mostly on its promise of access. India has been tackling the serious issue of
limited access to education, in which the Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) in higher
education is about 20.8% in 2010. The county has been faced by an increasing demand
for quality education with few available resources. This situation has created the need
for open and distance education, and more accessible educational materials that could
help Indian higher education.
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After various efforts made to promote Open Education across the country, the
governmental National Mission on Education through Information and
Communication Technology (NMEICT) released its Open Licensing Policy Guideline in
2009. The policy asks for the free provision of educational materials developed as a
result of its funding through the use of the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike
license (CC BY-SA). Reflecting the country’s situation, where access is key, the
guidelines emphasize the need for being open as it encourages the idea that “all
information products (content, software and technology) shall be treated as [a]
national resource”. The guidelines also stresses the importance of the discoverability
of OER by stating that provision of materials should follow the commonly-shared ways
so that educators and learners can find OER easily. To aid this purpose, the Indian
Government initiated the National Repository of Open Educational Resources
(NROER). As a repository, the NROER offers resources for all school subjects and
grades in multiple languages in the form of educational videos, audio, images,
documents and interactive modules, all licensed under CC BY-SA.
The guideline seems to be positively accepted by society, but there are also several
problems that need to be addressed. There is still a lack of awareness among those
involved in teaching and learning, and an unwillingness to upload educational content
to the web as many higher education institutions fear risking their intellectual
materials in a competitive higher education market. However, Indian government,
higher education institutions, and other stakeholders have put their efforts towards
helping OER realise its full potential, by developing an OER repository, actively using
Creative Commons licenses, and practicing localised OER activities that fit Indian
situation and culture.
Key links:
• Government of India (2014). Gross enrolment ratio (GER) in higher education
(18-23 years) for 2010-11: https://data.gov.in/catalog/gross-enrolment-ratio-
ger-higher-education
• Bansal, T., Chabra, S., and Joshi, D (2013). Current Initiatives and Challenges to
OERs in Indiana Higher Education. Asian Journal of Distance Education, 11(1), 4-
18. http://www.asianjde.org/2013v11.1.Bansal.pdf
• National Mission on Education through Information and Communication
Technology (2009). Open Licensing Policy Guidelines:
http://www.sakshat.ac.in/Document/OER_Policy.pdf
• National Repository of Open Educational Resources: http://nroer.in/home/
22
• WikiEducator (India): http://wikieducator.org/India
Open Science in Japan
In November 2014, seeing the importance of Open Science to further advance the
research and development within academia, the Japanese Cabinet Office started the
discussion on Open Science within the Expert Panel on Open Science based on Global
Perspectives.
Recognising the global trend toward openness in research, the Japanese government
decided to actively promote Open Science, building on the continuous effort made to-
date in Open Access in higher education. In the 5th Science and Technology Basic Plan,
which indicates the governmental policy plans from 2016 to 2020, the government
explicitly stated that any research results, including academic articles and associated
data from publicly-funded research, would be required to be openly accessible to the
public. Though yet to be decided, those resources would be licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution license, which encourages the active reuse of the resources. It
also mentions the need to develop a platform that could be used by data providers to
archive data and by re-users to obtain them.
There has been an emphasis to encourage this through the possible collaboration
among scientists and citizens not only within the country, but beyond borders. The
policy envisions that more innovation happens in scientific research when reusing a
variety of resources available on the web, such as experts working collaboratively in
different fields across countries, and citizens adding new perspectives to research
projects.
Key links:
• Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan (2015).
Gakujutsu-Joho no Opun-ka no Suishin ni tsuite (Promoting Open Access for
Academic Resources):
http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/gijyutu/gijyutu4/036/houkoku/136256
4.htm
• Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan (2016).
Dai-go-ki Kagaku Gijutsu Kihon Keikaku (The 5th Science and Technology Basic
Plan). http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/kagaku/kihon/main5_a4.htm
23
• Cabinet Office (2015). Promoting Open Science in Japan: Opening up a new era
for the advancement of science (Executive Summary).
http://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/sonota/openscience/150330_openscience_summa
ry_en.pdf
Open Data in Taiwan
Taiwan’s Open Data efforts and achievements are internationally recognised because
of its number 1 position in the 2015 Open Data Census. The 2015 Open Data Census,
led by the Open Knowledge Foundation, is the survey of Open Data as used by nations
around the world.
Open Data in Taiwan is often discussed in the context of Typhoon Morakot in 2009.
While PSI law had existed since mid-2000’s, the typhoon and subsequent criticism of
the government response led to the government’s provision of disaster-related data.
The more formal commitment came in 2012 with the Executive Branch’s Resolution
No.3322. The Sunflower Movement in the spring of 2014, an uprising against the trade
agreement between China and Taiwan and its lack of transparency, serves as more
background. One of the groups actively engaged in the movement, g0v, is dedicated to
government transparency and Open Data.
Put another way, Open Data in Taiwan has developed in conjunction with politics and
public opinion. As such, it is difficult to isolate Open Data’s own contributions to issues
such as disaster preparedness and trust in the government. But the same movement
toward transparency instituted a more formalised public consultation mechanism,
which in turn raised awareness of Open Data. One major outcome of all these changes
is the increased ties between government and civic sectors.
There are currently more than 50 Open Data programs that range from tourism to
transportation, and from disaster-preparedness to health. Open Data often receives
attention because of the government’s underperformance in disaster management –
the typhoon in Taiwan and the earthquake and nuclear meltdown in Japan were some
of the examples. With thousands of disaster-related data sets published and some
programs developed, Taiwan’s preparedness is somewhat improved now.
Key links:
24
• Knowledge Dialogues (2014) Open Data in Asia:
https://knowledgedialogues.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/open-data-asia-09-
2014.pdf
• Science & Technology Law Institute, Institute for Information Industry
(undated) Open Government Data in Taiwan:
https://stli.iii.org.tw/en/content_page.aspx?i=6432
• S. Roubini and J. R. Tashea (2014) After Sunflower Movement, Taiwan's g0v
Uses Open Source to Open the Government, The Tech President, November 5
2014: http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/25339/sunflower-movement-
g0v-taiwan-open-government
• T. H. Schee (2015) Global Open Data Index 2015 – Taiwan:
http://blog.schee.info/2015/12/09/global-open-data-index-2015-taiwan/
• data.gov.tw/applications
• J. Stray (2013) How does a country get to open data? What Taiwan can teach us
about the evolution of access. NiemanLab:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/04/how-does-a-country-get-to-open-data-
what-taiwan-can-teach-us-about-the-evolution-of-access/
• W. Ritter, T. Watanabe, T. Saengsiri, T.H. Schee, and K. Booth(2012) Open data
policy development in Asia, Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum,
20 JULY 2012: http://2012.rigf.asia/videotranscript/
25
26
Australia
Open Government and Research
The Australian Government continues a lumbering advance toward Open Access, with
the majority of effort associated with Open Data. The advance happens across the
three tiers of Australian government: federal, state, and local.
The Australian Federal Government: Open Education
The National Copyright Unit (NCU) is a small secretariat responsible for copyright
policy and administration for the Australian school and TAFE sector. Part of its
responsibility is to develop and implement ‘Smart copying practices’, such as
advocating for the use and creation of OER in Australia. As such the NCU works to
encourage schools and students to use Creative Commons resources, and encourages
creators of educational content to make their materials available under Creative
Commons licences, wherever possible, for the benefit of Australian schools and
students.
In 2015, the NCU became the new Education Lead of CC Australia and for many years
has been an active advocate of Creative Commons and the OER movement. In its role
as CC Education lead, NCU advises and runs an education program on Creative
Commons licences, and advocates for the use and adoption of OER to the School and
TAFE sectors.
Increasing recognition of value and benefits of OER
OER initiatives are emerging at an increasing rate throughout Australia, both at the
government and institutional levels.
The Australian Government and education administering bodies recognise the
importance of OER and Creative Commons licences and understand that OER policies
can impact and assist on a range of copyright compliance and education policy issues.
As such, all State and Territory Departments of Education have endorsed AusGOAL
and recently all the Australian Departments of Education agreed to licence their
websites and publications under CC BY 4.0 where possible. Tasmania, South Australia,
27
New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, Victoria and the Australian
Government Departments of Education have licenced their websites under CC BY 4.0
and the other states and territories are in the process of implementation. The non-
government school sectors are beginning to license their learning resources under
Creative Commons licences to ensure wider sharing and building of knowledge.
National OER Workshops
The NCU is planning a tour of National OER Workshops for late 2016 and 2017 that
will focus on curriculum and e-learning developers at Departments of Education and
non-government school sectors. The NCU also has new OER and Creative Commons
sections on their Smartcopying website (www.smartcopying.edu.au) that includes:
• An OER Toolkit,
• Updated information pack ‘Creative Commons for Educators’,
• Template copyright/creative commons notices for websites and publications,
• Creative Commons Posters,
• Videos on OER, and
• International best practice.
The NCU and AusGOAL are also currently doing AusGOAL and Creative Commons
workshops with Government Lawyers, internal e-learning, curriculum developers,
teachers, etc. as requested.
Other OER initiatives in Australia
Other OER initiatives in Australia include Education Services Australia licensing more
than 1600 digital learning resources from the national digital resources collection
under Creative Commons licences (with many more to come). These Creative
Commons licensed resources are available from Scootle. The Australian Curriculum is
licensed under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence in order to ensure that the curriculum is widely
accessible to teachers and schools and to facilitate the development of teaching and
learning resources. The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority
(ACARA) is also in the process of licensing www.acara.edu.au; www.naplan.edu.au; and
www.australiancurriculum.edu.au under CC BY 4.0.
The NCU actively encourages not only educational institutions, but also businesses
and organisations that wish to provide educational resources to the school sector to
also licence their material under either CC BY or CC BY SA. Recent organisations
28
include UNICEF Australia and the National Rugby League. The NCU expects to see
more and more publicly funded educational resources licensed under Creative
Commons.
OER Toolkit for Schools Curriculum Developers
The NCU has developed an OER Toolkit for teachers, curriculum and e-learning
developers. The toolkit is a practical guide designed to support curriculum creators in
understanding and making use of open educational materials in creating curriculum
resources and ensuring future materials can be openly licenced. The toolkit provides
detailed information on Creative Commons licences and practical advice on how to
licence resources under Creative Commons. Importantly the Toolkit developed a ‘Best
of OER’ list to assist people finding high quality OER quickly. In the true spirit of the
OER movement NCU’s toolkit is built on the fantastic CC licenced works of CC
Aotearoa’s publication “Free to Mix”, the Leicester City Council’s “OER Guidance for
Schools” and the ‘OER Copyright and Licensing Toolkit’, by South African Institute for
Distance Education.
Copyright 4 Educators on Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU)
The NCU offers one of the foundational courses of Peer 2 Peer University’s School
Open, and has run the Copyright 4 Educators course through P2PU since 2009. P2PU
is a grassroots open education project that organises learning outside of institutional
walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. Copyright 4 Educators
currently has one week dedicated to OER and Creative Commons licences, but is in the
process of adding an additional week on OER. This course is run online, twice a year
with an intake of approximately 60 learners. The course is unbelievably popular.
Enrolments for the course usually fill within 24 hours and have, on average, a wait list
of 70 people! The average retention rate for the seven-week course is 87% over the
past three years. The NCU is looking to run an entire course dedicated to OER in the
future.
The Open Government partnership in Australia
In November 2015 the Australian Government committed to finalising membership to
the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and a public consultation was launched to
develop an Australian Government National Action Plan for open government. The
NCU made a submission on behalf of the Australian government and non-government
schools sectors asserting that OER policy must be a key component of Australia’s First
National Action Plan. The NCU submitted that in order to achieve the maximum
29
benefit from the expenditure of public funds, the Commonwealth Government needed
to ensure greater accountability in relation to existing OER policies, by:
• openly supporting and encouraging the implementation of AusGOAL in
Commonwealth Departments, ensuring that the body administering any
appropriate publicly funded initiative/project/resource is required to openly
licence the resources in accordance with the AusGOAL framework, making
them widely and freely available;
• openly supporting and encouraging the use of OER and developing an
Australian version of GoOpen.
Education Departments across Australia are leading the way by openly licensing their
websites and publications, but there needs to be a clear reaffirmation of the Australian
Government’s commitment to and the importance of open licensing as well as
dedicated support and resources for advice and implementation. The NCU advocated
for (and volunteered to lead) the creation of an OER working group to spearhead these
initiatives.
Next steps
The NCU will continue to advocate for the use and creation of OER in Australia. Other
than continuing with the activities listed above, the NCU with AusGOAL is also:
• Reviewing IP policies in Departments of Education and Schools, and expanding
OER policy to encourage Schools and Teachers to licence teaching and learning
material under Creative Commons;
• Specialist training in Departments of Education and non government school
sector on CC licensing – e-learning, curriculum, communications and IT areas;
and
• Amending procurement policies and funding agreements to require that Public
funded information is released under the CC-BY licence, inclusive of nested
materials.
30
Case studies
Schools using Creative Commons
OER in Australia is also being adopted at the local, school level. Teachers and students
are increasingly using OER to eliminate copyright concerns and bypass the complex
copyright rules. OER allows for significantly more engagement with materials than
what the Australian educational copyright licences and exceptions allow and enables
educators to fully use, adapt and share resources with their school community and the
world at large.
For all the above reasons, OER is best suited for the modern day classroom. And due to
this, it is being picked up daily by different schools, teachers and students.
As an example of one such school, Carina State School, a primary school in Brisbane,
Queensland, recently held its first carnival in 16 years, and it also set a new standard
for Australian schools by being an exemplar Creative Commons Community.
The school held an amazing School Carnival Art Gallery in which Creative Commons
licences were applied to all of the student works. Creative Commons music was played
in the gallery, which avoided any additional costs or copyright concerns, and the school
has plans to use Creative Commons licences in future activities.
The school has taken a proactive approach to copyright by using the Creative
Commons licences, and has introduced them to their students in a fun, creative and
practical way, in the first event of its kind in Australia!
The take home message for the school, students, parents and all that attended the
Carnival was that Creative Commons licences work! They’re a simple way to overcome
copyright concerns and allow for greater dissemination and sharing of artwork, culture
and information generally.
To find out how Carina State School created a Creative Commons Community and how
your school can too, see the full blog post: http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/open-
education/creative-commons/carina-state-school-a-creative-commons-community
31
Using government policies to leverage implementation of OER
The NCU is a strong advocate for using government policies to leverage
implementation of OER. Below we’ve discussed three recent instances of this.
Australia’s Innovation Policy
In Australia copyright law is standing in the way of Australian schools using innovative,
digital technology in the classroom. There is an urgent need for reform. Copyright laws
designed in the age of the photocopier are not working in the age of the iPad and the
3D printer and are holding back innovation in Australia’s schools. The Australian
Government recently released a new Innovation Policy, and schools simply cannot
meet the Government’s innovation goals when outdated and inflexible copyright laws
are impeding them. OER policy must be a key component of Australia’s innovation
policy. To make the Government aware of these issues, the NCU has drafted letters,
submissions and taken meetings to communicate to Government that education and
innovation policy is focused on increasing Australia’s STEM capability, but copyright is
operating as a roadblock and open licensing is one part of the solution to these
problems.
Open Government Partnership
In November 2015 the Australian Government committed to finalising membership to
the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and a public consultation was launched to
develop an Australian Government National Action Plan for open government. The
NCU made a submission on behalf of the Australian government and non-government
schools sectors asserting that OER policy must be a key component of Australia’s First
National Action Plan. The NCU submitted that in order to achieve the maximum
benefit from the expenditure of public funds, the Commonwealth Government needed
to ensure greater accountability in relation to existing OER policies, by:
• openly supporting and encouraging the implementation of AusGOAL in
Commonwealth Departments, ensuring that the body administering any
appropriate publicly funded initiative/project/resource is required to openly
licence the resources in accordance with the AusGOAL framework, making
them widely and freely available; and
• openly supporting and encouraging the use of OER and developing an
Australian version of GoOpen.
32
Education Departments across Australia are leading the way by openly licensing their
websites and publications, but there needs to be a clear reaffirmation of the Australian
Government’s commitment to and the importance of open licensing as well as
dedicated support and resources for advice and implementation. The NCU advocated
for (and volunteered to lead) the creation of an OER working group to spearhead these
initiatives.
Educating schools, government departments and curriculum creators on OER
The NCU is a small secretariat responsible for copyright policy and administration for
the Australian school and TAFE sector. One responsibility of the NCU is to educate the
school and TAFE sectors regarding their copyright responsibilities. Having this
responsibility has allowed the NCU to be in daily contact with the Departments of
Education as well as schools and individual teachers, principals and librarians. This puts
the NCU in the unique position to have meaningful relationships with a wide range of
organisations throughout the education sector in Australia, which leads to having a
real effect on daily decision making in schools as well as allowing the NCU to educate
from the grassroots level as well as at the Departmental level.
For example, from speaking with curriculum developers we learned that there was a
lot of confusion on OER and Creative Commons, generally, and also a widespread
belief that it was difficult and time consuming to find OER. Once this came to light, the
NCU was able to create a Toolkit directed toward curriculum developers, but also to
the education sector as a whole on Creative Commons and also how to quickly and
easily find OER. Teachers, Education Departments and also curriculum developers in
both the government and private sectors use this Toolkit widely throughout Australia.
More broadly the NCU knows that educating as many people as possible on OER will
help with the implementation of Creative Commons and OER in Australia. This has led
to the development of numerous different training sessions and workshops
throughout the country. This has been very well received, and the NCU is looking to do
additional workshops later this year and next year.
The NCU also offers an online course, Copyright 4 Educators that currently has one
week dedicated to OER and Creative Commons licences, but is in the process of adding
an additional week on OER. This course is run online, twice a year with an intake of
approximately 60 learners. The course is unbelievably popular. Enrolments for the
course usually fill within 24 hours and have, on average, a wait list of 70 people! The
33
average retention rate for the seven-week course is 87% over the past three years.
The NCU is looking to run an entire course dedicated to OER in the future.
Constant interaction with the education sector in Australia has allowed the NCU to be
effective in developing learning opportunities and resources for the sector that quickly
become the ‘official guide’ for all of the Australian education sector and allows the
NCU’s message on OER and Creative Commons to have a real effect and reach a wide
audience.
Key links:
• www.smartcopying.edu.au
• http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/open-education/creative-commons/carina-
state-school-a-creative-commons-community
• http://www.esa.edu.au/
• http://www.scootle.edu.au/ec/p/creativeCommons
• www.acara.edu.au
• www.naplan.edu.au
• www.australiancurriculum.edu.au
• https://ogpau.govspace.gov.au/national-action-plan/
• http://www.opengovpartnership.org/
• http://tech.ed.gov/open-education/
• https://p2pu.org/en/courses/3040/copyright-4-educators-aus/
34
35
Latin America
If the measure for Open Policies in the region is the number of adopted policies or
legislations at national or state level, then Latin America cannot be called an open
policy territory. However, there are some interesting examples and certainly a good
prognosis for the future of openness in this part of the world.
Open Educational Resources
The landscape of textbooks in the region can be illustrated by the work of university
libraries that had been trying to address the lack of books by offering photocopying for
free. Yet the budget is not enough to meet the demand; for instance, there is a ratio of
50 students per book in the courses with most attendance. In order to compensate for
this discrepancy, some students end up getting illegal copies while others do not even
have access to them. Just over 40% of students who participated in the survey
“Percepciones, actitudes y prácticas respecto a los libros de texto, digitales y en formatos
abiertos por parte de estudiantes de universidades de América Latina” [‘Perceptions,
attitudes and practices regarding digital and open textbooks, by students from
universities in Latin America’] declared not having access to required textbooks as a
problem and they said that the type of material most used is the photocopy of textbook
chapters, used by 43% of students.
It is also worth mentioning that in 2013 Uruguayan students rallied against the
criminalisation of photocopies and promoted copyright reform that could provide a
more flexible understanding of the needs and uses of the education process. The
discussion of a new draft law is in mid-2016 was on the table for the Creative
Commons Uruguay team.
The debate on the adoption of OER is still at an early stage in Latin America. The
exception to this is Brazil, with some small pockets driven by local institutions.
Certainly, it is important to note how the debate has grown in Brazil and how strong
the OER community is there. The “giant of the south” is definitely enabling an
environment for the creation of public policies that fosters the promotion and
development of OER. For more information about Brazil’s OER community, see
Recursos Educacionais Abertos no Brasil website on http://www.rea.net.br.
36
Another milestone for Latin America is the National Strategy for Digital Open
Educational Resources (REDA, in Spanish) of Colombia that was adopted in 2012. This
strategy is unique in the region and focuses on higher education by establishing the
roadmap for creating a national OER system. Defined by a Ministry of Education
(MoECo) official in a presentation at the Bogota Workshop (September 2014), REDA is
an investment project that requires technical capabilities available in higher education
institutions (HEIs); therefore, OER engagement has been paramount to its
implementation.
The consolidation of the REDA system in Colombia is materialising through technical
committees formed by HEIs engaged in the Ministry-led process. That way, the MoECo
ensures the participation of key stakeholders in the process of developing the national
system. REDA has established three types of resources: learning objects, virtual
courses and education applications. Today there are more than 200 resources with a
CC license. However, most of these resources are not open materials (they are tagged
with licences that are not considered open). It is hoped that this might change as the
system has been designed in such a way that open and public resources may be
included.
The Colombian strategy is a good example of how to engage educational institutions
and government in a joint project to promote, strengthen and enhance the production,
management and use of OER. Although it is too early to assess the process, it is a
government commitment that is worth paying attention to.
Apart from these two specific examples of policy discussions there is no country in
Latin America with a consolidated OER policy or legislation. What we can see is that
the development and promotion of Open Educational Resources appear more among
the civil society sector and academic institutions, and not as public policies.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that at K-12 level, all countries have educational
websites that have been created through a regional project of the Ministries of
Education Red Latinoamericana de Portales Educativos (Latin American network of
educational portals, RELPE in Spanish). The local websites serve, among other uses, as
a digital educational resource repository. However, there seems to be no clarity on
what is understood as OER because the licenses used on most of the resources in those
repositories prevent them from being considered Open. For instance, in the
educational portal “EducarChile” there is a statement that promotes free access to
37
digital educational resources, but the website terms and conditions prohibit the
reproduction, copy, distribution, adaptation, and communication of the contents
contained on the website. This result is frequent in public “OER” initiatives, therefore it
is possible to say that public access (rather than Open Access) to digital resources is
becoming the norm in the educational sector of the region, and this is precisely the
main challenge.
OER is an area of many unexplored possibilities, but in Latin America it is still in its
infancy. In this field there are great opportunities to raise awareness, institutional and
organisational development, and, of course, policy making. The task is monumental
(see the link to the google doc below for more information).
Key links:
• http://www.eluniversal.com.co/educacion/editores-y-estudiantes-enfrentados-
en-uruguay-por-fotocopia-de-libros-139453
• http://www.creativecommons.uy/un-proyecto-por-el-derecho-a-estudiar/
• http://www.rea.net.br
• http://www.colombiaaprende.edu.co/html/home/1592/articles-
313597_reda.pdf
• http://186.113.12.159/es/web/rn/inicio.
• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xUNpaDpa4JqGbfFK6bKkzxnOVsGHZ
9MFZHOh4NSBiYM/edit?pref=2&pli=1
Open Access
In a study on access to scientific production in Latin America and the Caribbean,
Dominique Babini found that there is minimal presence of open scientific production
services in international journals in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The research showed that open access services available to scientific and academic
publications in the region include: multidisciplinary portals of scientific journals,
SciELO and Redalyc; portal to portals of Latindex journals; a Cybertesis portal; and
thematic digital repositories, such as the Agricultural Information System of the
Americas (SIDALC, in Spanish), the Network of Virtual Libraries of Latin American
Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO, in Spanish), the Virtual Library on Health-Latin
American and Caribbean Literature in Sciences Health (BVS-LILACS, in Spanish), or the
38
Virtual Library of Sustainable Development and Environmental Health-Pan American
Network for Environmental Health (BVSDE- REPIDISCA, in Spanish). 1
The finding of the research was that the content offering Open Access in the region
contrasts with the extensive scientific production, “which remains within the circuit of
the international commercial distribution of journals, invisible and inaccessible to
those who do not subscribe to those services.”2
It is noteworthy, however, how some Latin American initiatives on Open Access to
scientific production are growing and trying to fill the gap3.
The Scientific Electronic Library Online (ScIELO) is a project that was developed
between 1997 and 1998 to give visibility of and universal access to scientific literature
produced in developing countries, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean. The
SciELO project stems from the cooperation between the Foundation for Research
Support of the State of São Paulo, the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health
Sciences Information, and national and international institutions related to scientific
communication and editors. Currently, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia,
Costa Rica, Cuba, Spain, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, South Africa, Uruguay and Venezuela
participate in the ScIELO network.
This project is comprised of three components. The first is the SciELO Methodology,
which enables the electronic publication of scientific journals, the organisation of
bibliographic databases, full texts, text retrieval, preservation of electronic records,
and the production of statistical indicators that show impact and the use of scientific
literature. The methodology also includes journal evaluation criteria based on
international scientific communication standards. The second component is the
application of the methodology to operate websites of electronic journal collections,
which also facilitate the operation of national sites, as well as thematic sites. Finally,
there is partnership development between national and international scientific
1
Babini, D. (2011). Acceso abierto a la producción científica de América Latina y el
Caribe. Identificación de principales instituciones para estrategias de integración
regional. Revista CTS. 17( 6), pp. 31-56.
2
Ibid, p. 35.
3
This conclusion is drawn from the analysis in Politicas Editoriales de Publicaciones
Académicas en América Latina (2011), by Alberto Cerda and Juan Carlos Lara.
39
communication actors, with the aim of disseminating, improving and making the
SciELO project sustainable.
Another initiative that has been an important promoter of Open Access in the region is
the Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America and the Caribbean, Spain and
Portugal (Redalyc, in Spanish). Redalyc is a bibliographic database and a digital library
of open access journals. The project began in 2002 with the overall goal of building a
scientific information system comprised of leading journals in all areas of knowledge
published in and about Latin America. Today, Redalyc is an information system that
also evaluates the scientific and editorial quality of the knowledge in Ibero-America.
Redalyc offers an online newspaper library that enables reading, downloading and
sharing scientific articles for free. It also generates indicators to assess quantitatively
and qualitatively the way science is done in Latin America. Thus, it supports efforts
undertaken to make scientific findings available for greater discussion among experts
and visible to a broader public.
Additionally, the regional initiative of the Federated Network of Institutional
Repositories of Scientific Publications (better known as LAReferencia, in Spanish), is a
new and important stakeholder “that seeks to share and give visibility to the scientific
production of higher education institutions and scientific research in Latin America”.
LAReferencia has been a great boost to the Open Access movement in Latin American
countries (currently in Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El
Salvador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela) and especially as the home of the three Open
Access laws in the region. Since its conception, the LAReferencia strategy has been
focused on creating a framework of technical and organisational arrangements in
order to build the Federated Network of Institutional Repositories that is supported by
the public sector.
This initiative already has a search engine of scientific articles drawn from nearly a
hundred universities in Latin America. This has been possible thanks to the
commitments fulfilled by the member countries, which have taken positive steps for
integrating the various university and other research centers repositories to
LAReferencia search engine. To learn more about LA Rferencia development, see this
report.
The main result of the efforts driven by LAReferencia is that it has been successful in
promoting some national policies to ensure open access for publicly funded research.
40
Among the LAReferencia countries that have the requisite legislation in place are
Argentina, Mexico and Peru.
The Argentine law (Law No. 26.889 of 3 December 2013) provides that institutions
receiving state funding from the National System of Science and Technology must
create institutional open digital repositories, in which national scientific-technological
production will be deposited. In addition, the law provides for the mandatory
publication of primary research data after five years of collection, so that other
researchers can use them.
Peru in 2013, passed the Law on National Digital Repository of Science, which
establishes the obligation to publish the results of all scientific research funded, in
whole or in part, by public sources in the national digital repository, that is
interoperable with other regional and global repositories. In 2015, the Peruvian
government passed the decree regulating Open Access to narrow the application of
the latter.
In 2014, Mexico amended the Law on Science and Technology, General Education Law
and the Organic Law of the National Council of Science and Technology to promote
Open Access to all knowledge generated with public funding. The legislation also
expanded the powers of the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT, in
Spanish) to develop a national strategy for the democratisation of scientific
information and to develop quality criteria and technical standards to establish
repositories. Additionally, it creates the foundation for the creation of a National
Repository of Open Access to be operated by CONACYT.
Key links:
• https://www.derechosdigitales.org/wp-content/uploads/Informe-
Politicas_Editoriales_de_Publicaciones1.pdf
• http://www.SciELO.org/php/level.php?lang=es&component=44&item=1.
• http://www.redalyc.org/info.oa?page=/acerca-de/faqredalyc.html#tab3.
• http://lareferencia.redclara.net/rfr/sites/default/files/LAReferenciaTresPagina
s.pdf
• http://lareferencia.redclara.net/rfr/sites/default/files/edicion-especial-
referencia.pdf
41
Open Data
The Open Knowledge Foundation proposes as a definition that, “open data is data that
can be freely used, repurposed, and redistributed for anyone”. In this sense, it aims the
construction of collections through the regeneration of already existing information.
The Open Data movement is linked to an initiative known as Open Government, which
attempts to construct transparent governments with accessible information for
citizens who can use them to explore their interests. Nonetheless, it does not only limit
the public information but, on the contrary, invites businesses and civil society
organisations to join the process.
Open Government Data is data that governments, administrations and public entities
generated in the performance of its functions. Since they are funded and collected with
public money, the information contained in this data is public and should be available
to any citizen for any purpose. In addition, this data should be available in an open
format that respects technical standards and allow the combination of sets of data
from different sources, reuse and dissemination. Therefore, they must generally
respect the principles and definitions of open data. For example, information and data
published in pdf format can satisfy a form of transparency, but can not be considered
open government data. Limitaciones and exceptions to the open data concept refer to
data containing information that affects fundamental rights to privacy of personal
information or to national security reasons.
According to the publication “Open Data and Intelligent Cities in Latin America: A case
study” from the Economic Commision for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL),
with regards to Open Government Data in South America, each day there are more
and more governments committed to Open Data policies. In 2013, there were 43
countries globally with such commitments including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia,
Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, data has risen as a tool that can propose changes
and give necessary responses to the people, especially considering the challenges that
public policies face in those countries. In the region, this is becoming more frequent
with countries who lead these processes; for example, Mexico and Chile (who both
rank in the top 25 of the Open Data Barometer of 2014). Brazil, Argentina and
Uruguay were not far behind in positions 28, 31, and 34, respectively.
42
In this same sense, the Open Data Index of 2015 is a tool that seeks to measure the
state of open data of all the governments in the world with specific criteria. They
included in their first 20 rankings with Colombia in 4th place, followed by Brazil in
12th, and Mexico in 13th place.
The growth of the concept of open data in the region has gone hand-in-hand with the
Open Government Partnership, a multilateral initiative that integrates 66 countries
around the world that seek to change the availability of information and its uses for
citizens, improve the transparency of decision making processes, and create
mechanisms of collaboration between governments, CSOs, businesses, and others.
México, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Dominican Republic,
Colombia, Perú, Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay are part of this
coalition.
If this situation demonstrates a good panorama of the region, the challenges they
present are many and relate to the implementation of scenarios that control the
collective production of the tools, the participation of the citizenry, and the social
control from transparent governments.
Key links:
• http://confdatosabiertos.uy/inicio/datos-
abiertos/que+son+los+datos+abiertos
• http://repositorio.cepal.org/bitstream/handle/11362/37089/S1420540_es.pdf
?sequence=1
• http://idatosabiertos.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/1.-Cocreacion-
innovacion-y-datos-abiertos-Bonina.pdf
• http://index.okfn.org/place/
GLAM
The penetration of the political will towards more formal parameters of openness
within the cultural sector of Latin America is still in the initial stages. In general,
cultural politics can identify with a philosophy of openness, but it seems they are
inching closer to the idea of free access. It was not possible to identify any specific
national political or grand scheme with specific characteristics relating to this
movement in the region. There may be public initiatives that agree with the idea of
43
Open, but they do not have a real commitment or identification with the movement,
and perhaps that is the reason for them to hold back from any implementation.
There are, however, specific initiatives at public libraries, memory centers, museums,
cultural centers, etc., both in the public and private sectors that have adopted Open
Policies and started to move towards the idea of being formally identified with this
movement.
Two examples of this can be found in Uruguay and Chile.
In Uruguay, motivated by the bicentennial of its independence, a bicentennial law was
promulgated that obligated the “formation and implementation of artistic and cultural
projects, understanding that the generation of favorable conditions to facilitate the
development of publications along with the promotion of debate and historic
reflection in IberoAmerica.” In the framework of this law, there appears an initiative
called “Photos of the Bicentennial Independence for Everyone”, a gallery on flickr with
a CC license.
In Chile, the Investigations of Chilean Memory project, from the National Chilean
Library (DIBAM) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.
Case Studies
Open Access: Argentina Public Policy
In November 2013, the Argentine scientific institutions successfully achieved
something only three countries have been able to do: the approval of a national law for
Open Access. Silvia Nakano, National Director of Physical Resources in Science and
Technology of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation, is one of
the women who has led the adoption of Open Access policies in Argentina, and the
region. It is defined as an optimal moment for political will to be secured and the
appropriate institutions to advance within a law project before Congress that will
finally be approved in a unanimous manner without major opposition in the debates.
An ideal scenario, something we rarely find in the world in favor of open politics:
44
“We could explain it to the legislators that they treat open access and why we defend
this devolution to a society that paid for the scientific production and another manner
pays to access it as well. All of this is an untested process for me because it was the first
time it went to Congress.”
Almost three years after the approval of the law, Silvia believes that the impacts can be
seen in the backbone of the law that now regards Open Access political institutions as
scientific and educational. Argentine institutions are now required to openly publish all
aspects of its research, including partially completed research, that has received whole
or partial funding from the State. Furthermore, when it comes to the attitudes they
promote with regards to the use of Open Access, it presents an important challenge to
count a normative text that, although it is in an era of regulation, is without doubt a
pioneer in the region and its successes and errors will serve as a guide for other
countries in the region.
Today the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation is focused on the
approval of “Law 26899: Creation of Institutional Digital Repositories of Open Access,
Proprietary or Shared” relating to the Open Data initiatives proposed by the new
Argentine Government. They hope this will bring Open Access closer to designing a
true ecosystem for Open Science. As Silvia says, “We dream big: to have primary data
open and accessible in interoperable repositories, and that everyone can utilize
resources and advance their own research”.
When speaking with Silvia it becomes apparent that creating a public policy for Open
Access has been a learning experience for all stakeholders; the politicians, government,
and the institutions of science and technology. Specific lessons have covered two
principal aspects: “First, it brings to mind their own production, which is what they
produce at home; later, the successful quest to create a registry and institutional
memory for the research done by scientific institutions (as much in terms of thesis as
resulting data) requires work to be done that never ends. As we move forward, we still
have a lot of work to do, but we will never get bored in doing it”.
Open Education: Universidad de la República (Uruguay)
“We can affirm that in Uruguay, the University of the Republic has initiated the path
towards becoming an Open University,” says Patricia Diaz, lawyer, professor and
judicial leader of Creative Commons in this South American country. The work of this
public university is seen as the most important in the country. The University of the
45
Republic covers 90% of the demand for tertiary education. Its promotion and
adaptation of policies around Open Educational resources demonstrates how
academia can take a more active role in these open policy discussions in our region.
For law, the University of the Republic is a heavyweight player in the Uruguayan
political scene. In the words of Patricia, “this organic law requires the university to
influence the policy decisions of the country. As a political actor, the university can
approach parliament, for example, and for this reason they have an activist profile.” In
this context, their commitment to Open Education specifically covers three resolutions
that push open policies in the University. For example, from the year 2013, open
software and all open formats have been proprietary. Further, scientific production
circulates via open access and there has been support for the proposed virtual
repositories of learning at the University in order to make resources better used and
more open”.
How did they achieve this? For Patricia, the work of the Virtual Learning Environments
programme (ProEVA) continues to be one of the principal drivers that propels the
philosophy of openness. Institutions support the university’s open initiatives that
function within the University. These are the institutional repository, the multimedia
area, the open courses, and open resource. “They are a small team, lead by Virginia
Rodes, but they have implemented the idea of what Open Education is in Uruguay.” It is
interesting to note that to develop these open proposals they have relied on the
support of other actors, such as Open Software or the Uruguayan Chapter of Creative
Commons, to facilitate these alternative ideas, questions, and knowledge and enrich
the discussion outside of the institutional environment.
In 2015, the University began the REA Nucleus, an interdisciplinary workgroup that
includes academics, civil society representatives, and the state with the objective of
opening up research and the formation of the wheel of Open Educational Resources in
the country as they promote the policies that make them stronger. For the right to study
is one of their projects; a campaign that supports the proposed law regarding the
Federation of University Students (FEUU). This is the response to the break-ins that
occurred by the police in 2013 at the photocopy shop near to the Faculty of Law of the
University of the Republic. This incident demonstrated the problem of access to study
materials and the need to strengthen copyright exceptions for the use of materials for
research purposes and, of course, the importance of promoting Open Educational
Resources as elements in the guaranteed access to the knowledge in the digital era.
46
Open Data: Colombia
At the intersection between open data and open government, we have seen a new
element emerge for governments that are constructing themselves in the digital era:
the open government data. This can be seen in a box below.
In order to analyze and evaluate these types of initiatives, we find different models,
one of those is the process for the web creator, Tim Berners-Lee in the following
manner.
★ Available on the web (whatever format) but with an open licence, to be Open
Data
★★ Available as machine-readable structured data (e.g. excel instead of image scan of
a table)
★★★ as (2) plus non-proprietary format (e.g. CSV instead of excel)
★★ All the above plus, Use open standards from W3C (RDF and SPARQL) to identify
★★ things, so that people can point at your stuff
★★★ All the above, plus: Link your data to other people’s data to provide context
★★
Colombia is not the exception. The Latin American country forms part of the global
initiative for Open Government where their goals are to see the construction of a
framework that favors transparency, the archival of stories, and the fight against
corruption. Since 2011, the country comes working on the development and
implementation of tools and political technologies such as electronic administration,
the best offering of services, and the culture and application of ICT in clear language.
As a part of this initiative and in the strategy framework for Online Government, they
have created a web portal www.datos.gov.co, a website that “permits you to find, in a
unified manner, all the data published by public entities in Colombia in an open format
with the goal of these can be used by whomever in order to develop applications or
valuable services aggregated, to do analysis and investigation, exercise control tasks,
and whatever type of commercial or noncommercial activity.” According to the portal,
the open data is “everything from unprocessed primary data in standard formats to
interoperable ones that facilitate their access and permit their repurposing under the
47
custody of public entities and can be obtained and offered without reserve in an open
form without restrictions, with the goal that third-parties might reuse them and create
services derived from themselves.”
This strategy, led by the Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies -
MinTIC that in 2013 had 269 entities with 399 data sets, that have significant
advances. Currently the catalog has 2009 data sets of more than 500 public entities at
the local and national level; furthermore, these open data sets have developed close to
110 applications in the categories of: Agriculture and Rural Development,
Environment, Commerce, Communications, Public Hiring, Culture, Democracy,
Education, Finances, Public Function, History, General Information, Justice,
Legislation, Transportation, Mobility, Social Prosperity, Health, ICT, Employment,
Tourism, and Housing that seek to strengthen the access to the information that forms
part of the citizens impulse to develop ICT initiatives for collective benefit.
If we use the Berners-Lee evaluation methodology from the table above, the model of
open data in the Colombian Government would be three of five stars. This is a good
indicator for the country. It results that there had been important efforts at the outset
for data sets for the creation of new developments. In its creation, this initiative led the
national government to recognize as successful, Colombia appears as one of the
leading countries in Latin America in accordance with the Global Data Index published
by the Open Knowledge Foundation which places Colombia 12th overall globally.
Although there are still pending cases to resolve, initiatives like Self-Care from the
Ministry of Health and Social Protection, AGROCLIMA - Ministry of Agriculture and
the rural development for agronet; they realize the advances in the creation of tools
that apart from open data seek to satisfy different needs that different communities
may have in their daily life.
Keeping in mind the Tim Berners-Lee model as a means to improve so that Colombia
can reach five stars, the country must first emphasize the importance of data with an
open license. The licensing policies is precisely what needs to remain explicit for the
use of this data, already what has reached public domain is not a policy for the
documents produced for the government. On the other hand, a star is something they
should obtain for the linked data that will permit a major improvement of this and the
development of more applications.
48
49
Europe
Open policies in Europe
In the case of Europe, there are not just national developments to consider, but policies
developed at the level of the European Union (EU). The European Union covers 28
member states – the majority of European countries. Out of the four areas of interest
for our study, there are significant developments, at European level in Open Data, Open
Access and Open Heritage policies. Furthermore, some of the European states (or
specific institutions based within them) are among the leaders in the development of
open policies.
Open Data
According to the 2014 edition of the Open Data Barometer Global Report, the United
Kingdom is the global leader in Open Data policies, being given a perfect score for
readiness, implementation and impact. There are four more European countries in the
top 10 of the index: France, Denmark, Netherlands and Sweden. The European Open
Data Maturity Assessment 2015 that was conducted among EU member states shows
that 71% of these five countries have an Open Data Policy. 57% of the countries have
dedicated policies. In the rest the policies are integrated in general digital policies.
Interestingly, in most of the once without specific data policies, a higher number of
countries have an Open Data portal. This shows that, in the case of open data, practical
implementation is more widespread than policies itself.
Proper licensing (or lack thereof) remains an issue, and there seems to be a lack of clear
standards in this regard. According to the Assessment, 11% of the data is not free of
charge, 11 countries have policies that officially support a pricing mechanism for data,
and only 66% have a standard license policy. There also seems to be a lack of standards
regarding placing and marking data in the public domain – high levels of open licensing
suggests that some of the data might be improperly licensed.
Building on the experiences of the United Kingdom and other leading member states,
the European Commission has introduced its own Open Data policy, starting with a
50
2011 Commission Decision on the reuse of its documents. The European Union’s own
data have been made available, since 2011, on the European Open Data Portal.
The Commission is also supporting the development of a legal framework for open
data reuse within member states. The framework is through the 2013 Directive on the
re-use of public sector information, which establishes a common legal framework for
not just open data, but broadly understood public documents. In 2014, the European
Commission published “Guidelines on recommended standard licences, datasets and
charging for the re-use of documents”. Although the document is non-binding for
member states, it provides detailed guidance that includes the use of standardised
notices (such as Public Domain mark) for non-copyrighted resources and Creative
Commons free licenses or the Creative Commons Zero dedication in the case of
copyrighted works. Since the guidelines are related to a very broad definition of
documents included in European Public Sector Information regulation, they potentially
apply to every type of public or publicly-funded resource.
All in all, open data policies are relatively well developed in Europe, together with its
associated infrastructure. Challenges that remain concern the extent of data made
available, and its quality. Experts also point to the lack of political will as a barrier to
further implementing open data policies.
Key links:
• http://webfoundation.org/about/research/open-data-barometer-3rd-edition/
• http://www.europeandataportal.eu/sites/default/files/edp_landscaping_insight
_report_n1_-_final.pdf
• http://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/european-countries-making-clear-
progress-open-data
Open Access
In the European Union, open policies in the field of science and research where the
earliest to be developed among all open policies. In 2008, an Open Access pilot
program was initiated within the 7th Framework Program for Research and
Technological Development, a major source of research funding in Europe with a
budget of over EUR 50 billion. The pilot applied to half of the 7th Framework Program’s
themes (approximately 20% of the budget). It required that researchers who had
obtained research grants should deposit either the publication or the final manuscript
51
in an Open Access repository. An embargo period of 6 months (12 months for social
sciences and humanities) was allowed. The pilot made use of a significantly developed
repository infrastructure and stipulated the use of the researcher’s institutional or
thematic repository. A European-level Orphan Repository has been created to host
content when other repositories are not available.
In 2014, based on this pilot, an Open Access requirement was introduced in the
Horizon 2020, the 8th Framework Program with an estimated budget of EUR 80 billion
for years 2014-2020.
All beneficiaries of the program are required to ensure Open Access to publications
that have been funded in the program, in a scheme modeled on the FP7 Pilot.
Retention of rights and use of CC BY license is encouraged, but not required. The
Horizon 2020 OA scheme extends the policy to data through the Open Research Data
Pilot, established in several core areas of the program. Within the pilot, beneficiaries
are required to deposit all data and metadata needed to validate the results presented
in publications, in an open research data repository.
The Open Access policy and Open Research Data pilot establish an important best
practice case and point of reference for open science efforts in Europe. But the
practical reach of this policy depends on the number of research grants awarded to a
given member state. The impact of the policy will affect mainly states with high
capacity to conduct research.
In the meantime, there have also been efforts to coordinate the introduction of
national Open Access policies. In 2012, the Commission published “Recommendation
on access to, and the preservation of, scientific information”, which requires states to
introduce open access policies to all publicly funded research. The recommendation
also applies to open research data. A study of the ROARMAP registry, conducted
within the scope of the Pasteur4OA project, shows that in Europe there are 356
research institution policies and 65 funders policies present. Among the funders, there
are several national policies adopted in Europe, usually by national research funding
bodies. Such policies exist in France, Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Belgium, Hungary,
Lithuania, Norway, Spain and Switzerland. As the Pasteur4OA study notes, policy
alignment remains a crucial issue. For example, 65% of funder policies and 38% of
institutional policies mandate that an article is deposited in a way that meets the OA
standard. The Horizon 2020 policy is seen as a standard and point of reference in this
regard.
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In May 2016, the development of Open Access policies was recommended by the
Council of the European Union. In the meantime, the policy focus in Europe shifted
from Open Access to a broader concept of Open Science, which includes in particular
open research data. Representatives of member governments call both on the
Commission and the member states to develop policies that offer compliance with
Open Access provisions under Horizon 2020. Such strong commitment from national
governments will hopefully translate into further development of Open Science
policies in Europe.
Key links:
• https://www.openaire.eu/open-access-in-fp7-seventh-research-framework-
programme
• https://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/open-
access-pilot_en.pdf
• http://roarmap.eprints.org/
• www.pasteur4oa.eu/resources/198#.VysZuvl97cs
Open Education
Already in 2008, the Council of Europe advocated using OER in its recommendations
“Realising the full potential of e-learning for education and training”. Open resources were
seen as means of counteracting digital exclusion and equalising educational
opportunities. The development of Open Education policies by the European
Commission is limited by the fact that the European Union has very limited
competence and only a supportive role with regard to education, which remains a
national matter. Nevertheless, the concept of Open Education appears in key
European documents, starting with the strategy Europe 2020 from 2010.
In the communication Rethinking Education from 2012 the issue of open educational
resources is presented as an important aspect of using telecommunication
technologies in education and developing new forms of learning. The communication
urged member states to increase the scale of access to, and the use of, OER supported
by adequate quality assurance standards. This communication was followed in 2013
with a new educational strategy, presented in the communication Opening up
Education. This strategy recognises open educational resources as one of the pillars of
education. The European Commission recommends creating open resources and
53
preparing public institutions for new models of creating educational resources.
Member states are advised to support the openness of educational resources that are
financed from public funds.
An open licensing model for educational resources has been implemented in the
Erasmus+, a framework program for education, training youth and sport with a budget
of EUR 14.7 billion. Unfortunately, the licensing standard is very weak, and is without a
clear standard of open licensing. After two years of operation, there are no clear visible
effects of this policy; in particular, because there is no related repository that would
aggregate and make available OERs funded in this program.
None of the European states has a general Open Education policy that, for example,
enforces open licensing and the availability of publicly funded educational resources.
At the same time, in several countries there are important large-scale, public Open
Education efforts. These include national OER repositories in France and Norway, a
national open textbooks platform in Poland, OER-related initiatives within the French
digital higher education program Sup Numerique and the Slovenian Opening Up
Education initiative. Furthermore, in many other EU member states there are ongoing
policy debates on OER or smaller Open Education initiatives.
The Open Education space is distinguished in Europe from open data and open access
efforts by a lack of policy developments at EU level. This is due to the Union’s limited
mandate in the sphere of education. As a result, a level of coordination and
standardisation that is visible in these other spheres is lacking in education. In higher
education, Open Education policy efforts benefit to some extent from Open Access
developments and the fact that there is an EU-level research and innovation strategy.
Open Heritage or Open GLAM
In Europe, Open Heritage policies are the least developed of the four policy areas we
are analyzing. Cultural heritage institutions (libraries, museums, archives and galleries)
are late-comers to the debate on open availability of resources. Similarly, EU policies in
this sphere have been weak, with the sole exception of a cultural data sharing policy
implemented by Europeana, the EU digital platform for cultural heritage.
It is worth noting that in the case of heritage, there is lesser importance of licensing
solutions, due to the fact that heritage is either in the public domain, or institutions do
54
not have the rights to the in-copyright works, the copies of which they own. Therefore,
proper implementation of copyright law and its reform are more important.
In 2011, the European Commission published “Recommendations on the digitisation
and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation”. The
recommendations position the issue of openness of heritage in the broader context of
the digitization of heritage resources. Yet it includes only general language on ensuring
that digitized public domain content retains its public domain status. With regard to
Europeana, the document recommends openness of heritage metadata. As opposed to
the four other areas studied in this report, legislative work is acknowledged as an
important factor for heritage policy – the document mentions in particular orphan
works regulation as a way of ensuring greater access and reuse. In 2012, the Directive
on certain permitted uses of orphan works was enacted, yet the limited scope of the
regulation does not make it an effective tool for ensuring availability of orphan works.
Open Heritage policies are also related to European regulation on the re-use of public
sector information (which is significant for open data policies as well). Since 2006, the
EC considers Europe’s cultural heritage as a potential source of economic added value,
if it is properly re-used [recommendation from 28 August 2006]. This led the
Commission to include, in its 2013 revision of the Directive on Re-use of public sector
information, rules on making heritage available for re-use by libraries, museums and
archives. While these regulations do not yet provide a full open standard (institutions
are allowed to decline requests to make content available for re-use, and fees can be
charged), they are an important element for ensuring openness of heritage. It also
remains to be seen how this regulation is brought into law and then implemented in
member states.
In 2011, an important position document was published by the Comité des Sages, an
advisory group to the European Commission. In a document titled “The New
Renaissance”, wide access to, and use of, digitized public domain materials is the first
recommendation. Other recommendations concern openness of heritage metadata,
and dealing with in-copyright works through orphan works regulation.
Yet there are few examples of policies that put in place the broad rules recommended
in these documents. The Europeana Data Exchange Agreement is the sole exception.
The Europeana Data Exchange Agreement is a Europe-wide agreement between
Europeana and heritage institutions that are its data providers. According to the
55
agreement, all metadata submitted to Europeana will be published openly under CC0
Public Domain Dedication. Additionally, all objects will be published with rights
statements that clearly describe their copyright status.
Other than that, open heritage policies are implemented at institutional level. They are
not standardized and there have been few attempts to even map them. The most often
given example is that of the Rijksmuseum’s open collections initiative – although the
open practice of sharing public domain artworks is not supported by any formal policy.
Several institutions, such as the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) and the British
Library share openly public domain collections and adhere to standards concerning
licensing, preservation of the public domain, or open metadata; which can be seen as
forms of an open policy. Yet in comparison with the other fields of study in this report,
policies for open cultural heritage are not explicitly expressed. A rare example of such
policy is the Declaration of Open Policy of the Polish History Museum (highlighted as a
case study earlier).
Key links:
• http://pro.europeana.eu/page/the-data-exchange-agreement
• http://siarchives.si.edu/sites/default/files/pdfs/2016_03_10_OpenCollections_
Public.pdf
• http://muzhp.pl/pl/c/1526/deklaracja-polityki-otwartoci-mhp
Case Studies
Open Education Policy: City of Leicester, United Kingdom
In 2013, the City of Leicester in the United Kingdom initiated the “Building Schools for
the Future” program. This was an effort to modernise information and communication
technology infrastructure in schools. Although it’s main aim was improving physical
infrastructure, this was not the project’s only concern. The DigiLit Leicester initiative
was launched to ensure that school staff and learners had the necessary competences
to make best use of the new technology. A Digital Literacy Framework was developed.
The framework formed the basis for a survey of school staff on their digital skills.
The survey, conducted in 2013 and 2014, helped identify skill gaps among teachers.
Creation and sharing of educational resources was among one of the key deficiencies
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identified in the study. As a result, in 2015, a city-level policy was introduced to
provide guidance and support for the sharing of resources by teachers. Leicester City
Council gave formal permission to 84 schools across the city to release resources
created by their staff under an open license (In the UK, the copyright for works created
in the line of employment are automatically assigned to the employer). The Creative
Commons Attribution was chosen as the standard license within this policy.
Furthermore, the policy has been supplemented with a range of guidance documents
for teachers, explaining what Open Educational Resources are and how they can be
created. Based on the model policies, the city council continues to encourage other
schools in the district to review their licensing policies and join the initiative.
According to Josie Fraser, lead of the project, the policy “supports Leicester schools to
promote what they are achieving, and also to connect to, and collaborate with, other
schools, and to make educational resources accessible to learners everywhere”. The
Leicester City OER policy is unique in addressing the issue at the level of individual
schools, at which a formal policy can be combined with guidance and training. This
policy is also important for the way it ties OER with the issue of digital literacy, and
even more broadly use of ICT in schools”.
Key links:
• http://education.okfn.org/supporting-schools-to-use-oers/
• http://schools.leicester.gov.uk/services/planning-and-property/building-
schools-for-the-future-bsf/open-education-for-schools/
• http://openscot.net/oer/leicester-city-council-and-oer-for-schools/
Open Policy: Slovakia’s Open Government Partnership
Open Government Partnership (OGP) is an international platform of 69 countries that
supports the development of national open government initiatives. Its focus is on
accountability, transparency and responsiveness to citizens. The action plans
developed on a bi-yearly basis by each of the participating countries traditionally
include commitments that concern access to information and the reuse of public sector
information. Open data policies and commitments (including the creation of
repositories and the release of datasets) have been one of the key goals of OGP
members from the start.
57
In 2014, civil society actors began working on using the OGP as a platform to support
the development of other types of open policies. Slovakia, alongside the United States,
was the first country to include in it’s OGP national action plan for 2015-2016
commitments related to Open Education and Open Access. In both cases, the authors
of the Action Plan argue that educational or scientific resources can be understood in
relation to the Open Data concept, which builds the idea of added value through reuse:
“Just as with open data, it is desirable to remove as many limitations as possible for open
educational resources”.
Within its OGP national action plan for 2015-6, the Slovak government committed to
mapping existing public educational resources and identifying those that can be
released as OER; the mapping and analysis of existing repositories for the purpose of
using them to publish OER; the analysis of the procurement process for educational
resources and identifying possible barriers to making them OER; and proposing a new
procurement process that will enable textbooks and other learning resources to be
released as OER. This was all with the ultimate aim of running pilot of the new
procurement scheme.
Furthermore, they have undertaken similar commitments related to Open Access.
These include:
• The mapping and analysis of existing repositories for the purpose of using them
to publish Open Access publications;
• The identification of possible barriers towards full Open Access
implementation;
• The analysis of a possible requirement of making publicly-funded scientific
publications available to the public in an open and free manner; and
• The proposal of a mechanism for voluntary publication of data related to
scientific publications, such as Open Data.
These commitments are accompanied by measures related to promotion and
international cooperation on OER and OA. The Slovak OGP strategy is interesting as
an attempt to bridge barriers across sectors and to build an open strategy that
concerns public data, educational and scientific resources (the same argument can be
made about the OGP national action plan of the USA). OGP itself is significant as a
platform that provides ways of standardizing open policy development at a global
scale.
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Key links:
• https://openpolicynetwork.org/exciting-updates-on-open-government-and-
open-education/
Open Heritage Policy: The Polish History Museum
Individual institutions have been the drivers for change in the cultural heritage sector;
more so than in education or research. Institutional policies are important due to
relative autonomy of museums or galleries. One example of such a policy is the
“Declaration of Open Policy”, adopted in 2015 by the Polish History Museum. The
Polish History Museum is a national heritage institution responsible for preserving,
documenting and presenting the national history of Polish. The policy has been
developed by the museum with the cooperation of Creative Commons Poland and the
institutional lead, Centrum Cyfrowe.
In the Declaration, the museum commits to making available, as openly and broadly as
possible, both heritage resources and the effects of its own work. Furthermore, it
commits to supporting re-use of resources, such as the documentation of its
exhibitions, promotional materials, research results and scientific publication,
educational resources and published books. Protection of the Public Domain and the
use of Creative Commons licensing are both explicitly stated.
In its declaration, the museum adopted the following detailed rules:
• Object metadata will be made available in the Public Domain through the
Creative Commons Zero declaration;
• Digital copies of works no longer protected by copyright will be properly
marked as belonging to the Public Domain, through the use of the Public
Domain Mark;
• Resources will be published using open formats that are machine readable; and
• Educational and scientific resources produced by the Museum will be made
available with the use of Creative Commons licenses, with a preference for the
use of one of the free licenses.
For the Museum, open policy fits within its broader strategy and mission to promote
and make Polish history accessible. Greater availability and re-use of resources will in
particular extend the museum’s reach to new groups of citizens, lowering barriers that
are, for example, related to geographical distance or disability. After adopting the
59
strategy, the museum has became actively involved in a Polish network of open
cultural institutions. Most importantly, it is mentoring other institutions to adopt
similar open policies.
In the same year, the National Institute for Museology and Collection Protection
(NIMOZ) – the Polish Center for Excellence for Digitisation at the Museum – adopted
a report on legal aspects of digitisation. Recommendations, prepared by a group of
legal experts working with the institute, follow the lines of the MHP policy with regard
to protecting the Public Domain, making metadata openly available, and encouraging
the free licensing of copyrighted works that the museum owns.
Key links:
• http://creativecommons.pl/2015/07/muzeum-historii-polski-i-pierwsza-taka-
polityka-otwartosci/
• http://muzhp.pl/pl/c/1526/deklaracja-polityki-otwartoci-mhp
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61
North America
For the purposes of this report, the North American region encompasses the United
States and Canada. Both of these countries have been leaders in open policy across
various sectors, and have initiatives at both the national and state or provincial level.
As economically developed countries, the U.S. and Canada both invest significant
amounts of public funding in research, education and workforce development
programs that generate extensive amounts of data, publications, software, and other
resources. Open policies have a relatively strong presence in both countries, both at
the national and subnational level.
United States of America
The value of public access to publicly funded works in the U.S. has a longstanding
historical precedent in copyright law, under which virtually all works created by the
federal government are in the U.S. public domain. As a result, publicly funded
resources created by federal employees have been legally available to the public for
decades. The limiting factor has been a means of distribution, which is why the earliest
open policies in the U.S. focus not on open licensing, but on making government
resources digital, discoverable and usable by the public. Much of this happened
organically when U.S. government began to switch from print to digital online
distribution of public records in the 1990’s, and has expanded to other valuable
resources not originally intended for direct use by the public, such as raw weather
data, photographs from space, and Global Positioning System (GPS) data.
Open policy began to accelerate in 2009 when President Barack Obama took office.
The Obama Administration continued to open up government information, including a
landmark 2013 policy directive requiring all newly-created federal datasets to be open
and machine readable. More than 180,000 government datasets are now published on
Data.gov. The Obama Administration has also looked beyond government-created
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information to resources arising from work that the government funds through grants
and contracts.
In 2013 the White House issued a directive to agencies with large research budgets to
ensure that publications reporting the results of research grants are available to the
public within 12 months, building on an successful policy at the National Institutes of
Health enacted in 2008. While not strictly an open policy (as it does not require open
licensing), it is a significant step in that direction.
In 2015, the U.S. Department of Labor became the first agency to adopt a blanket open
licensing policy for copyrightable works arising from competitive grants, and the U.S.
Department of Education also began the process of adopting a similar policy. Both
agencies previously implemented open licensing policies at the grant program level.
Looking ahead to 2016 and beyond, the U.S. has made explicit commitments to open
policy in its 2016-2017 Open Government National Action Plan, relating to open data,
the open licensing of educational resources, opening up government-created software
code, and expanding public access to research results. This plan is significant in light of
the upcoming 2016 presidential election, since it will help raise the visibility of open
policy as an issue for the next administration.
There have also been significant advances in the U.S. at the sub-national level. At least
six state governments have funded programs to expand the use of open educational
resources—California, Connecticut, North Dakota, Oregon, Texas, and Washington—
and numerous more have adopted policies encouraging this approach.
A handful of public institutions of higher education have also begun adopting policies,
such as the California Community College Chancellor’s Office policy requiring open
licensing for all resources arising from grants and contracts. It has also become
increasingly common for large philanthropic foundations — which are subsidised by
the public through tax exemptions — to adopt open policies. One notable example is
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which (starting in 2017) will require that all
research publications arising from foundation grants be openly licensed and freely
available immediately, along with the underlying data. Other foundations, including the
Ford Foundation and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, require open licensing
on all resources arising from grants.
Key links:
63
• https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expanding-public-access-
results-federally-funded-research
• http://sparcopen.org/news/2016/dol-open-licensing-policy/
• https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/11/30/2015-30279/open-
licensing-requirement-for-direct-grant-programs
• https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/final_us_open_
government_national_action_plan_3_0.pdf
• http://www.californiacommunitycolleges.cccco.edu/Portals/0/DocDownloads/
PressReleases/SEP2013/PRESS_RELEASE_CreativeCommonsBY_090913_FIN
AL.pdf
• http://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/General-Information/Open-
Access-Policy
• https://www.fordfoundation.org/the-latest/news/ford-foundation-expands-
creative-commons-licensing-for-all-grant-funded-projects/
• http://www.hewlett.org/about-us/values-policies/commitment-open-licensing
• http://www.iyfnet.org/blog/fixing-skills-gap-aerospace-industry-mexico
Canada
Canada has made a number of notable advancements in open policy, particularly in the
areas of Open Data and Open Education. Canada launched its first federal Open Data
portal in 2011, which now encompasses more than 100,000 datasets, including an
extensive collection of geodata. Canada codified an Open Data policy in its 2014
Directive on Open Government, which required open and machine readable as the
default for all government datasets and information. Canada has developed and
implemented a special license for government data and information called the Open
Government License - Canada, which is considered compliant with the Open
Definition. The country has further committed to expand its Open Data program in its
2014-2016 Open Government plan. There has also been significant progress on Open
Data at the sub-national level, with more than half of Canada’s provinces and
territories running Open Data initiatives that encompass more than 250,000 datasets.
Canada has also taken steps toward opening up the results of research. In 2015, three
large federal agencies — Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural
64
Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) — adopted a coordinated policy
ensuring public access to research publications arising from their grants within 12
months. The policy builds CIHR’s successful public access policy, which was enacted in
2008. Like the 2013 U.S. directive, this is not a true open policy but takes an important
step in that direction.
Canada is widely recognised for its leadership of Open Education at the provincial
level. In 2012, the government of British Columbia launched an initiative to create
openly licensed textbooks for popular courses at the province’s public post-secondary
institutions. The goal of the initiative was to address the cost of textbooks, which
added significantly to the cost of higher education, by supporting the creation and
adoption of open alternatives that would be free to students. To date the program has
created more than 150 open textbooks, impacted nearly 15,000 students, and saved as
much as CAD 1.8 million. British Columbia has inspired similar programs in other
provinces, and in 2014 signed a MOU with Saskatchewan and Alberta outlining a
framework for inter-province collaboration on open textbooks.
Key links:
• http://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset
• https://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx?id=28108
• http://opendefinition.org/licenses/
• http://open.canada.ca/en/content/canadas-action-plan-open-government-
2014-16
• http://open.canada.ca/en/blog/open-data-across-canada-snapshot
• https://open.bccampus.ca/2016/06/01/the-b-c-open-textbook-project-
celebrates-another-milestone-151-open-textbooks/
• http://www.gov.sk.ca/adx/aspx/adxGetMedia.aspx?mediaId=f3d342c4-ab61-
44a4-9f96-71ceb7810a5d&PN=Shared
Case Studies
TAACCCT (USA)
One of the most prominent examples of open policy is the United States’ $2 billion
TAACCCT program. Short for the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College
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and Career Training program, TAACCCT was a large federal grant fund administered
by the Department of Labor to improve workforce training opportunities for workers
impacted by foreign trade.
TAACCCT was authorised by Congress in 2009 during the financial crisis, when many
Americans who lost their jobs returned to school in the hopes of gaining employable
skills. The goal of the program was to help “upskill the workforce” nationwide by
retraining workers in skills for high-demand jobs, which made it critically important to
think about how to expand the benefits to the whole country.
When the Department of Labor launched the program in 2011, they turned to open
licensing to ensure these one-time investments could have an impact at scale. As a
condition of receiving TAACCCT funding, grantees were required to release all
workforce training resources (from textbooks to curricula to videos to software) and
other copyrightable works under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, and
freely distribute the materials via a repository. Over four years, the program
distributed grants to community colleges and other two-year degree granting
institutions across all 50 states, spanning dozens of industries and hundreds of careers.
The first two rounds of grantees have posted their materials in the Skills Commons
repository, and there have been more than 100,000 downloads of the materials to
date. The impact of the open licensing policy is already visible, as other colleges,
employers and members of the public are beginning to use and reuse TAACCCT-
funded resources
The impact isn’t limited by U.S. borders. The Air Washington consortium, one of the
grantees in Washington state, developed a program to train aeronautic technicians. A
career training institution in Chihuahua, Mexico then used the openly licensed
resources as the basis of a curriculum for their local aerospace industry’s needs. Rather
than starting from scratch, they translated the TAACCCT resources into Spanish and
made adaptations. And in turn the Mexican institution further shared the curriculum
with other schools.
Building on the success of TAACCCT’s open licensing requirement, in 2015 the
Department of Labor expanded the policy agency-wide for all competitive grant
programs.
66
Key links:
• https://www.skillscommons.org/most-popular/item
British Columbia Open Textbooks (Canada)
In 2012, the rising cost of textbooks on top of other higher education expenses had
become a major issue for students. Textbooks for introductory subjects often topped
CAD $200 a piece, and frequent revisions made it difficult to buy and resell used
books. Expensive textbooks could act as a barrier to accessing education, and the
provincial government of British Columbia (BC) decided to take action by launching
the BC Open Textbook Project.
The BC Open Textbook Project was charged with creating a collection of openly-
licensed textbooks for the top 40 highest-enrolled subject areas in the province. Led by
BCCampus, a publicly-funded organisation that assists higher education institutions
with technology, the project aimed to increase access to education by expanding the
use of open textbooks, which are free to students. The rationale was that focusing in
high enrollment courses could benefit the greatest number of students, and provide
the faculty with an alternative to the expensive textbooks that dominated the market.
The power of open textbooks is that once they are created, they can be used, tailored,
updated, and shared forever, for free.
Within two years, their collection of open textbooks contained 70 titles and the project
had saved students more than CAD $350,000. In 2014, the provincial government
announced that the project would expand to an additional 30 textbooks focused on
key job skills. Around the same time, British Columbia signed a memorandum of
understanding with two other provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, expressing intent
to collaborate on developing open textbooks.
As of 2016, the BC Open Textbook Project has saved students as much as CAD $1.8
million and has more than 150 open textbooks in their collection. Illustrating the true
value of open licensing, BCCampus created only 60 of those books, the rest being
adapted or reused from other contexts. The open textbooks have been adopted in
more than 500 courses, impacting more than 14,000 students. And, according to the
project website, they show no signs of stopping.
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Open policy played a critical role in this project’s success, since open licensing ensures
that the textbooks would be freely available for students, faculty and members of the
public to use. This not only achieves the project’s stated goals for BC students, but also
provides the same benefits to students in other provinces, and around the world.
Key links:
• https://open.bccampus.ca/about-2/
• https://news.gov.bc.ca/stories/free-online-textbooks-developed-for-skills-
training
• http://www.gov.sk.ca/adx/aspx/adxGetMedia.aspx?mediaId=f3d342c4-ab61-
44a4-9f96-71ceb7810a5d&PN=Shared
68
69
Open Policy Index
The scope of the survey
The objective of our survey is to provide an overview of how different countries of the
world are engaging in developing and implementing open policies. We are interested in
mapping policy developments related to varied spheres where openness is promoted,
namely: open education, open data, open source software, open heritage and cultural
content, open access and open science. We define these spheres in following manner:
Open Education (OE): policies concerning Open Educational Resources
(OER) and other forms of openness of education
Open Science (OS): policies concerning Open Access (OA) to research
articles, open research data, and other forms of openness of scientific
and research materials
Open Data (OD): policies concerning data owned by governments,
including all forms of public sector information
Open Heritage (OH): policies concerning heritage collections, cultural
works and cultural metadata
There have been some previous efforts to survey developments in specific domains,
such as the repository of OER policies created by Creative Commons or the Open Data
70
Index4, which served as an inspiration for this survey. Yet, a regards other areas, no
efforts to map these policies have been made to date. Also, we are not aware of the
existence of any previous examples of studies examining various types of open policies
at the same time. This report aims at addressing this gap. We hope that it will lay the
foundations for a complex, multidimensional analysis of the development of open
policies around the world.
Our survey is based on a universal scorecard that can be used to measure open policy
developments in a given country, in all of the four policy areas that we defined. By
looking at open policies across a range of policy areas, we can ascertain the general
state of openness of public resources and institutions across the world. It also provides
us with the opportunity to identify data on potential synergies between policies
developed in neighbouring countries, or in different areas in a given country.
The project was conducted by an international research team with participants from
Australia, Colombia, Japan, Poland, South Africa and the United States. Via an
international team of researchers, we wanted to ensure a global scope of the project. It
provides an overview of the state of open policies in 2015. As part of the survey, we
received data on 38 countries thus obtaining coverage of nearly all of the regions of
the world (Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South Americas, and Oceania). However, no
data was submitted by Middle Eastern countries. Only Kyrgyzstan represents Central
Asia in the survey.
Our open policy index is based on data concerning two dimensions of open policies:
policy strength and the scope and level of policy implementation.
The first dimension refers to the extent of the existing policy. The following scoring
system was adopted:
0 – no policy in place
1 – some experimentation, at least one notable project, but no policy in place
2 – policy discussion in progress
3 – policy exists, applies to part of the government or relevant institutions
4 – policy exists, applies to the whole government or all relevant institutions
5 – government-wide policy exists, additionally implementation guidelines are
in place
4
Open Knowledge Foundation (2015) Global Open Data Index. http://index.okfn.org/
71
The second dimension refers to what extent a policy that had been approved is actually
being implemented. The following scoring system was adopted:
0 – no implementation
1 – minimal level of implementation
2 – wide-scale implementation is in progress
3 – government-wide implementation is in progress
4 – government-wide implementation is established, takes place on an ongoing
basis
5 – level 4 implementation, additionally either policy review and revision
process is in place, the policy has been implemented in the long term, or
legislative measures have been taken to make the policy long-lasting.
Based on these scores, we have grouped countries into three categories: “leaders”,
“mid-way”, and “delayed”. Countries with scores of 5 and 4 are defined by us as leaders
in open policy development. Countries with scores between 3 and 1 are mid-way in the
process, and countries with scores of 1 or 0 are delayed. (Subdecimal figures were
rounded up). For the 5-point score data, please see the Annex to this report.
A detailed methodology and a breakdown of the 5-point score data is presented in the
annex at the end of the report.
Open policies – global leaders
Based on the available data, we have created a compound index that includes, with
respect to each country, data from both dimensions of the index, defined for the four
policy areas. This gives us the broadest view of open policy development and allows us
to identify the countries that demonstrate the best results in this process.
The top 10 countries with the highest scores are:
Argentina New Zealand
Bolivia Poland
Chile South Korea
France Tanzania
Kyrgyzstan Uruguay
72
Open policies – policy scope
Open Education Open Science
31.6 36.8
39,5
52,6
7,9
5,3
7,9 18,4
Open Heritage Open Data
18.4
28,9
39,5 47.4
7,9
5,3
34,2 18,4
n No data n delayed n mid-way n leaders
A comparison of the four policy areas across the 38 researched countries
demonstrates different levels of policy development. The most developed is the field of
open data with 42% of countries comprising the category of leaders. Such a high
percentage of leaders suggests that open data policies are extensively deployed. In the
three other fields, however, fewer than 10% of countries were defined as leaders. The
field of open heritage policy is the least developed, as the study has shown, with nearly
half of the countries being delayed (lack of data for another 25% most likely means
that there is no visible policy process at all). The two other fields, namely open
education and open science, are similarly developed, with more than 50% of countries
classified into the mid-way category.
73
Eighteen countries are leading in at least one of the four policy areas with regard to the
scope of introduced policies. New Zealand is a unique example among all the studied
countries since it marked a high, leader-level score for policy scope in three out of the
four policy areas that were defined. Five other countries score high in two policy areas:
Belgium, France, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, and South Korea.
Open policies – policy implementation
Open Education Open Science
23,7
36,8
52.6
57.9
10,5
2,6 7,9
7,9
Open Heritage Open Data
18.4 18,4
34.2
47,4 7,9 5,3
26,3 42,1
n No data n delayed n mid-way n leaders
The implementation of policies across the four policy fields follows a similar pattern to
the scope of developed policies. In the field of open data, we observed the highest
number of leaders (18%), with almost half of the countries in the mid-way category.
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Open heritage is the field with the lowest level of policy implementation – almost three
quarters of respondent countries have none at all or a minimal level of policy
implementation. Over half of the countries are delayed as regards open education
policy implementation, and 40% are delayed in the field of open science. Ten countries
are leading with regards to implementation of which the following five obtained high
scores in at least two policy areas: Argentina, Canada, Chile, France and Kyrgyzstan.
In general, there is a correlation between the scope of developed policies and their
implementation. Also, countries are on average more advanced in developing policies
and their scope (average score of 7.5 out of 20) than in implementing them (average
score of 6 out of 20). Comprehensive policy development and implementation is quite
difficult, which demonstrates that open policies still have room to grow in most of the
countries covered.
Policy scope and policy implementation
16
14
12
Policy implementation
10
8
6
4
2
0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
-2
Policy scope
75
Europe
76
America
77
Africa
Asia
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Other results
Geographically, one notable pattern that can be observed is that there is no clear
difference between the developed and developing countries in terms of achievement
levels. This stands in contradiction with the leadership positions held predominantly by
the UK and the U.S., as indicated by the results from the question concerning foreign
countries that are seen as point of reference for own policy initiatives. The
achievement levels of the U.S. are not the highest in terms of open policy areas. The
factors behind this gap between high-achievers and countries commonly perceived as
leaders may be issues such as the availability of accessible information, language,
general influence over the openness movement and IT-related practices, as well as
inspiring cases and anecdotes. However, the results of this survey indicate that there
are many countries that would benefit from seeking inspiration for good policies and
implementations from neighbouring countries.
Another notable issue is that some countries rate the "Level of Policy Implementation"
higher than "Policy Strength and Scope." The reason behind this may be pilot projects
and experimental practices going ahead of policy discussion.
The survey also attempted at finding out whether there are any other countries that
act as a reference or as influencers in policy development and related processes. The
countries named most often in this part of the survey were the United States of
America and the United Kingdom (especially with regard to open data). In Africa, for
instance, respondents named other countries in the region as their points of reference,
as well as mentioned the importance of international organisations, such as the
Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie. In Europe, on the other hand,
respondents mostly referred to the European Union and other European states. Here
is a link to the correlational diagram visualizing the relationships between the referred
and referring countries:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bzv9NtaCViWqaklFWS1xc0pLbzQ/view?usp=sharing
Limitations and Further Research
This study was conducted within the bounds of limited resources. The geographic
coverage was far from comprehensive. Coverage of Asia was particularly weak. One
reason for this might be the language barrier, while other reasons might be the weak
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network relations existing among Asian countries. Still, there is room for improvement
of the coverage. Thematic coverage could be expanded to incorporate open source
policies for software, and possibly other areas as well.
Appendix: Survey instruments
Below are the main parts of the survey instruments. The survey is also available online
at:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Mnkc4_kBDV2JkBnIxqev4MAiLojar0fBsdEZMAh
7LV4/viewform
Policy Strength and Scope
What is the status of open policy discussions and decisions (such as legislation and
executive decisions) in your country or jurisdiction? Please rate the state of open
policy decisions according to the table below.
Policy Strength and Scope
Score State Explanation
5 Government-wide decision Satisfies the condition set for Score 4 below,
made + implementation and there is some guidance on such issues as
guideline published for metadata, desirable file format, and/ or
quality and standardization licensing and rights-clearance.
4 Policy decision made for the OD: All of the government agencies have to
entire government or all of follow some decision obligating that they
the relevant government practice open data.
agencies OE: All of the relevant government agencies
have to follow some decision obligating
them to impose open requirements for
educational resources developed with
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government funds.
OH: All of the relevant government agencies
have to follow some decision obligating
them to require cultural heritage data to be
open.
OS: All of the relevant government agencies
have to follow some decisions obligating
them to impose open requirements for
research data or research papers created
using government research funds. (Note that
if either data-related policy or paper-related
policy is government-wide, the country gets
the score of 5 here).
3 Policy decision made for part There is a decision (law, regulation, or
of the government executive decision) applicable to at least one
government agency.
OD: According to the decision, the
government agency must practice an open
data approach.
OE: According to the decision, the
government agency must require open
provisions of educational resources for
resources developed with government
funds.
OH: According to the decision policies
concerning heritage collections, cultural
works and cultural metadata.
OS: According to the decision, the
government agency must make research
papers or research data from government-
funded research projects openly available.
(Note that if either data-related policy or
paper-related policy exists at least for one
government agency, the country gets the
score of 4 here).
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2 Policy discussion in progress Open Policy in a given area (OE, OD, OH, or
OS) is currently discussed or proposed in
some parts of the government.
Those discussed before but did not become
governmental policies are not included here.
1 Some experimentation but no There is at least one notable project in a
policy discussion given area.
0 No activity No significant discussion nor experiment
exists in the given area.
Level of Policy Implementation
This part asks respondents whether the country actually does what its open policies
promise – how widely does the country make progress in policy implementation?
Please rate the state of the country according to the table below.
Level of policy implementation
Score State Explanations
5 4+ at least one of the Conditions set for Score 4 below are met. In
following: addition, at least one of the following
1. policy review and conditions are met:
revision 1. Policy is reviewed and amended at least
once after some open information resource is
2. long-term practice
produced.
3. legislative measure
2. Open information resources have been
taken to make the
produced for at least 5 years.
policy long-lasting
3. There is a law obligating the production of
open information resources.
4 Government-wide policy Open information resources are produced
implementation on an under some open policy continuously. All the
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ongoing basis relevant government agencies are engaged in
the production directly (in the case of OD), or
by imposing obligations on relevant parties,
such as recipients of government funding.
3 Government-wide policy There are some open information resources
implementation in progress produced under some open policy. All the
relevant government agencies are, or will
soon be engaging in such production directly
(in case of OD), or by imposing an obligation
on relevant parties, such as recipients of
government funding.
2 Wide-scale implementation There are some open information resources
in progress produced under some open policy. And it
involves at least two or all of the relevant
government agencies either directly (in the
case of OD), or by imposing an obligation on
relevant parties, such as recipients of
government funding.
1 Some implementation There are some open information resources
attempted produced under some open policy. But it is
limited-time effort or an experiment at one
government agency.
0 No implementation There are no open information resources
produced, although there is some policy
requiring such production.
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