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Issue No. 17
NEWSLETTER
May — June 2010
Share, Reuse, Remix
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creativecommons.org
CC Newsletter
Creative Commons Launches Catalyst Grants Program!
As a supporter of Creative Commons, you recognize the importance of what we
do to make knowledge easily, freely, and legally available to everyone.
We are excited to announce the Catalyst Grants program, through which we will be award-
ing grants of $1000 to $10,000 to researchers, educators and technologists around the
world. Grant recipients will be selected through a rigorous public review and transpar-
ent evaluation process involving representatives from CC’s affiliate institutions.
Catalyst Grants will make it possible for individuals and organizations to harness the power of Creative
Commons. A grant might enable a group in a developing country to research how Open Educational
Resources can positively impact its community. Another could pay for a programmer to add CC
license support to tools for publishing and distributing news. A third could fund a study of entrepre-
neurs using Creative Commons licenses to create a new class of socially responsible businesses.
But we can’t do it without your help. Our goal is to raise $100,000 from CC supporters like you
to fund the Catalyst Grants. Please donate today to help spread our mission of openness and
innovation across cultural and national boundaries.
Sincerely,
Joi Ito
Chief Executive Officer
Creative Commons
Photo by Mizuka,
CC BY 2.0
2 / May–June 2010
CC Newsletter
Art & Media
Swedish museum Historiska tion and the future of participa-
Museet Adopts CC Licenses tory culture. For filmmaker and artist
Vincent Moon, licensing his work
Earlier this week Swedish museum Histo- under CC makes sense “because it is
riska Museet announced the adoption of CC a way of thinking, it is a way of life,
licenses for their digital catalog. Roughly and it is something to fight for.” Eren
63,500 item photographs, 1200 illustra- and Francesco from Film Annex find
tions, and 264,500 scanned catalog cards importance in Creative Commons
are now released, depending upon the because it “encourages produc-
medium, under our Attribution-Noncom- tivity and further creation/distribution of content among film-
mercial-No Derivative Works license or Attri- makers.” And Cable Green, head of the Open Course Library
bution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Project, is exploring the value behind sharing digital educa-
Project Manager Ulf Bodin notes that while the museum is start- tional resources to make textbooks more affordable. Check out
ing out with a more restrictive license choice they hope to find these three interviews and more in the CC Talks With series:
ways to continue to open their catalog with fewer restrictions in
the future. Like the Brooklyn Museum, Historiska Museet is look- http://creativecommons.org/interviews
ing at this as a first step, aiming to provide more openness as they
better understand how the public will use these new resources.
Full story: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/20922 Nina Simon’s The
Participatory Museum
The Participatory Museum, a new book
Collaborative Futures, a FLOSS Manual from Nina Simon on ways to increase
audience participation in cultural insti-
FLOSS Manuals, true to its name, produces manuals for free soft- tutions, is now available in full under
ware applications. The manuals themselves are freely licensed and a CC Attribution-NonCommercial
often written in book sprints. This January, as part of the Trans- license. The book contains an incredible
mediale festival in Berlin, FLOSS Manuals attempted its first non- amount of useful and thought-provok-
manual booksprint — a considerably harder task, as no structure ing information for those working in
is implied. Only the book title, Collaborative Futures, was given museums and other cultural institu-
— a collaborative experiment about the future of collaboration. tions. Outside of the book itself, Simon
posted on the process of self-publishing
The collaborators all had considerable experience with free soft- – including a deeper look at her license choice – on her Museum 2.0
ware or free culture collaborations — Michael Mandiberg, Marta blog. In addition to its free release online, The Participatory Museum
Peirano, Alan Toner, Mushon Zer-Aviv, Creative Commons Vice is available for purchase as both paperback and PDF download.
President Mike Linksvayer, and FLOSS Manuals’ honcho Adam
Hyde and programmer Aleksandar Erkalovic. Read more about Full story: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21533
the writing process and check out the final product, released
under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21374
CC Talks With: Vincent Moon, Film Annex,
& The Open Course Library Project
Creative Commons had the chance to catch up with three exem-
plary Commoners in March to talk about their various uses of
Creative Commons and why they feel CC is key for collabora-
May–June 2010 / 3
CC Newsletter
Education
Creative Commons and Open Educational CC Talks with: Karen Fasimpaur on
Resources in the U.S. National Technology Plan Open Education and Policy
We were thrilled to learn of the National Technology Plan highlight- One venue for the advancement of Open
ing Open Educational Resources (OER) as “an important element of Educational Resources (OER) is through
an infrastructure for learning” and the vital role Creative Commons policy change at the local, state, federal,
plays in underpinning the success of the OER movement. The and international levels. In addition to a
Plan outlines how the U.S. Department of Education will play a new Education landing page and an OER
role in “stimulating the development and use of OER in ways that portal that explains Creative Commons’
address pressing education issues.” We see this as a huge victory role as the legal and technical infrastruc-
for the OER movement and look forward to continuing our role ture behind OER, CC has been conducting
of supporting innovative developments in the future of learning. a series of interviews to help clarify some
of the challenges and opportunities of OER in today’s education
Full story: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21054 landscape. We caught up with Karen Fasimpaur, a blogger, author,
creator of the Kids Open Dictionary, and co-founder of K12 Open Ed.
Read the interview: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21786
CC and Education Landing Page and
Wiki Project
In early April we launched two important Pratham Books uses CC to Make Children’s
resources for anyone interested in Creative Books Accessible
Commons and education - an education land-
ing page and OER Portal. The goal of the Pratham Books is a nonprofit children’s book publisher in India,
education landing page is to quickly introduce set up to “fill a gap in the market for good quality, reasonably
our site visitors to the vast number and range of Open Educational priced children’s books in a variety of Indian languages.” At the
Resources (OER) available for use as well as the role of Creative time, Pratham Books had released six children’s books under a
Commons licenses in enabling OER to reach its potential. The land- CC BY-NC-SA license, available on their Scribd page. Since then,
ing page also features a number of links for anyone who wants to they have changed the licenses on those books to Attribution
learn more about OER & CC and/or wants to contribute their own Only (CC BY) and have expanded their offerings to books in the
knowledge. Most of those links point to the OER Portal/Project on public domain. They have also been blogging extensively and
our wiki. Our goal for this section is for our community to add useful encouraging remix of their CC licensed illustrations on Flickr. Last
information about OER as well as help curate this information. month, the CC licenses enabled audio versions of Pratham chil-
dren’s books for India’s National Association of the Blind. Three
Education landing page: http://creativecommons.org/education audio versions were recorded by Radio Mirchi, two in English and
one in Urdu, with more in the works, demonstrating the power of
CC licenses to foster a more participatory and accessible culture.
CC Vietnam Celebrates Launch at Open- Full story: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21430
CourseWare Consortium’s Global Meeting
May 7th marked the celebration of the localized Creative
Commons licenses in Vietnam, the fifty-third jurisdiction
worldwide to adapt the Creative Commons licensing suite
to national law. The Vietnam Education Foundation together
with D&N International and Creative Commons have overseen
the localization of the licenses in consultation with the Viet-
namese public and key stakeholders in the jurisdiction.
Full story: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21945
4 / May–June 2010
CC Newsletter
Science
GlaxoSmithKline Releases Valuable Malaria to the goal of making it easy to contribute to and enable discov-
Research Data into the Public Domain ery based on the growing body of open scientific research data.
GlaxoSmithKline contributed to the public domain more than The coordinating editors, including Creative Commons’ own
13,500 compounds known to be active against malaria. They are Alan Ruttenberg, recently announced that six ontologies have
the first large corporation to implement the CC0 tool for making met their review requirements — the first set of ontologies to
data into open data. The Tres Cantos dataset contains the struc- successfully meet all of the conditions laid out. These ontolo-
tures and screening data for compounds confirmed to inhibit para- gies include Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (CHEBI),
site growth by more than 80% — meaning that researchers world- Gene Ontology (GO), Phenotypic Quality Ontology (PATO), the
wide now have a truly free place to look for cures for malaria, Protein Ontology (PRO), Xenopus Anatomy Ontology (XAO),
without worrying about patents or other database rights. This and the Zebrafish Anatomy Ontology (ZFA). These ontolo-
is big news in the science world and we hope to see even more gies are now preferred targets for community convergence.
corporations adopting an open approach to scientific and medi-
cal research in order to speed the discovery of cures worldwide Full details: http://www.obofoundry.org/wiki/index.php/
Announcement_of_First_Set_of_OBO_Foundry_Ontologies
Sage Congress Video Now Available
Global Biodiversity Information Facility
This past April, Creative Commons and Sage Bionetworks put on the Taskforce Makes Formal Recommendations
first Sage Commons Congress in San Francisco. The event brought on Use of Identifiers
together a wide array of experts, from network biologists, represen-
tatives from key funding bodies, scientists, disease researchers and The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) recently made
advocates. We encourage you all to check out the video and presen- available on their Web site the result of a working group meet-
tations, which are now available on the Congress Web site, espe- ing on persistent identifiers for biodiversity data. Among the task
cially Josh Sommer’s luncheon keynote on his fight with chordoma. force members is Creative Commons’ Principle Scientist Jona-
than Rees, as well as other representatives from research univer-
Streaming and downloadable video as well as sities and botanical gardens. The group formally recommends
accompanying slidedecks for most of the presentations the adoption of persistent identifiers for informatics in this field
can be found on the Congress Presentation Page: with active support from GBIF, and goes into explicitly what
http://sagecongress.org/WP/presentations the requirements are, what’s meant by a “persistent, action-
able identifier,” to citation and integration issues. It skirts ongo-
ing debates over technology choices, emphasizing that persistence
and actionability are at root social problems, not technical ones.
The document is available here:
http://www2.gbif.org/Persistent-Identifiers.pdf
Announcing the Launch of Public
Discussion of CC Patent Tools
OBO Foundry Announces its First
Set of Ontologies We’re happy to announce that we’re launching the public
comment and discussion period for our new patent tools: the
Biomedical research suffers because it is difficult to use knowl- Research Non-Assertion Pledge and the Public Patent License.
edge in aggregate. The OBO Foundry is an initiative to create a We invite you to join the discussion at our public wiki. There
group of biological and biomedical ontologies that covers a wide you can read about these tools, catch up on hot topics of inter-
range of life science phenomena in a modular fashion. By build- est to the community, or join our public discussion list to contrib-
ing and promoting a well designed and scientifically credible set of ute your thoughts and suggestions. These tools were conceived
vocabularies for describing the results of research, we move closer as part of our collaboration with The GreenXchange, a network
May–June 2010 / 5
CC Newsletter
of companies interested in making publicly available unpatented It was a lively event, and video is online at Video for
know-how and patented inventions that have the potential Milken is at http://www.milkeninstitute.org/events/gcpro-
to promote innovation, sustainability, resource management, gram.taf?function=detail&eventid=GC10&EvID=2131
and other socially responsible uses of ideas and inventions.
Full story: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21481
Creative Commons Discusses Energy
Policy at the White House
Creative Commons Hosts Symposium John Wilbanks joined CC friends from Nike and the Kauffman
on the Future of Science Foundation for a Presidential Forum on Energy Innovation at the
White House in May. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke keynoted
This February, we convened the first ever Creative Commons a day of conversations about technology transfer, and the CC
Science Symposium — a daylong event held at Microsoft Research’s patent licenses were a featured part of the afternoon sessions
campus in the Seattle area. The topic of the day was “The Future on open innovation. The Obama administration announced key
of Science,” and featured presentations from some of the leading innovation strategies during the event ranging from invest-
minds from the Open Access and Data Sharing world. Joining the ments in energy for regional innovation “clusters” to matching
bill was Stephen Friend (Sage Bionetworks), Jean-Claude Brad- grants connecting small businesses focused on energy systems.
ley (Drexel, Open Notebook Science pioneer), Cameron Neylon
(STFC), Peter Murray-Rust (Blue Obelisk), Antony Williams (Chem-
Spider), Heather Joseph (SPARC), Peter Binfield (Public Library of
Science) and our own Vice President of Science, John Wilbanks.
Full story: http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/
archives/2010/03/09/science-commons-symposium/
Milken Global Conference Tackles Patient
Data Issues
Creative Commons VP for Science John Wilbanks participated in
a panel discussion called “Patients Helping Doctors: Unlocking the
Information Researchers Need” at this year’s Milken Global Confer-
ence. More than 3,000 attendees gathered in Los Angeles for this
year’s event, representing over 60 nations. The panel featured
luminaries like Susan Love (Founder, Susan Love Research Foun-
dation), Jamie Heywood (Chairman and Co-Founder, Patients Like
Me), and Jack Cochran (Executive Director, Permanente Founda-
tion). The panel examined questions about the information embed-
ded in patients - from a unique medical history to tissue, blood and
DNA — that is crucial to understanding and managing disease. But
too often that information remains unavailable to researchers.
6 / May–June 2010
CC Newsletter
Government
Australian Government Commits to New Dutch Government Portal Uses CC0
Open Access Public Domain Waiver as Default
Earlier this month, the Australian federal government issued an offi- The Netherlands government has launched Rijksoverheid.nl, a
cial response to the Government 2.0 Taskforce report which recom- new website that all Dutch ministries will migrate to. Creative
mended, among other things, that Australian Public Sector Informa- Commons Netherlands notes that the site’s copyright policy
tion (PSI) should be released under CC BY as default. The response signals a seriousness about open sharing of public sector infor-
(licensed CC BY) included a commitment to the development of mation — its default is to remove all copyright restrictions
a comprehensive set of IP guidelines which would, in principle, with the CC0 public domain waiver. This is great news, as Rijk-
follow the Gov 2.0 Taskforce recommendations. Since then, Austra- soverheid.nl not only signals a true commitment to open-
lia has released three major government publications under Creative ness but also sets a strong example for other governments.
Commons licenses, the latest being their national budget under
CC BY. This marks an exciting time for the Australian government, Full story: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21473
as they move towards fulfilling their commitment to openness.
Full story: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/22017
Attributions
Page 4
Front Cover Karen Fasimpaur by Ali Shute — BY
Blue — BY-NC-SA http://www.sixtwofourdesigns.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/piotrzurek/4418802259/
Page 5
Page 3 Emergency Exit: Semantic Web (White on Green) — BY-NC-SA
Made of glass from Vendel parish Up http://www.flickr.com/photos/25094278@N02/2368194103/
by Christer Åhlin SHMM — BY-NC-ND
Page 6
Vincent Moon by Brantley Gutierrez — BY Corpus inside my Heart III — BY-SA
http://www.bmgphoto.com/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/zjootsuite/2357298229/
The Participatory Museum Cover design by Jennifer Rae Atkins
May–June 2010 / 7
CC Newsletter
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This newsletter is licensed under
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Please share and remix!
Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous Editing
support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, Allison Domicone
Google, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the
Mozilla Foundation, Omidyar Network, Red Hat, and the William Art Direction
and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as members of the public. Alex Roberts
8 / May–June 2010