CC Needs Assessment Report on Public Domain Tools in Cultural Heritage Sector Unveils Key Insights

Today Creative Commons is proud to release our report on the Needs Assessment entitled Are the Creative Commons Public Domain Tools Fit-For-Purpose in the Cultural Heritage Sector?. From 1 January (Public Domain Day) to 15 February 2022, we ran a multilingual online survey using Google Forms to share a 50-question questionnaire in English, French and … Read More “CC Needs Assessment Report on Public Domain Tools in Cultural Heritage Sector Unveils Key Insights”

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CC Open Education Platform Lightning Talks: Join us on 2 February 2023

The Creative Commons Open Education Platform community welcomes you to our Lightning Talks, or seven-minute presentations on specific updates or stories in open education.

Kicking off our Lightning Talks series for 2023, presenters will highlight: open educational resources (OER) as tools for social justice, work/life balance, climate change and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Presenters will also focus on particular platforms, such as LibreTexts and Curationist, which provide technical advancements for open education. Learn more about the presentations below. 

Join us via Zoom at 4:00 PM UTC on 2 February 2023, ready to learn. Determine the meeting time in your local time zone

 

Reimagining Open Education as Social Justice

  • Speakers: 
    • Ravon Ruffin, Educational Programs Manager at MHz Foundation. Ruffin is also CEO and co-founder of the creative studio and arts incubator Brown Art Ink. 
    • Amanda Figueroa, Community Director at MHz Foundation. Figueroa is also the co-founder of Brown Art Ink.
  • Summary: This session will be an overview and exploration of the Curationist platform, a digital open access tool for publishing materials found in the Creative Commons and public domain. This tool brings together arts and culture communities to find, share, collaborate, and reimagine cultural narratives. Curationist is a response to the urgent call for decolonial methodologies within curation, education, and art, and will exist as a vital resource within openGLAM, OER, and Indigenous data sovereignty.

LibreTexts 101: Building the Textbook of the Future

  • Speaker: Delmar Larsen, Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Davis, and Founder and Director of the LibreTexts project.
  • Summary: Larsen will provide a topical overview of the LibreVerse – the suite of tools and technologies to advance the building and usage of OER textbooks, assessments, and other activities. The overview will include a discussion of the Libraries, ADAPT homework system, jupyter, Commons&Conductor, SOLO, bots and more. The key approach to the LibreVerse is to build and use technology to advance specific goals and avoid its limitations. Hence, a multi-goals effort like LibreTexts requires a multi-technology platform – the LibreVerse.

Using Machine Translation Algorithms to Effectively generate Non-English language OER Textbooks

  • Speaker: Delmar Larsen, Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Davis, and Founder and Director of the LibreTexts project.
  • Summary: Larsen’s presentation will outline recent efforts of leveraging the centralized corpus of OER textbooks hosted on the LibreTexts platform toward a greater global impact. LibreTexts will discuss the implementation and impact of two approaches in building non-English language OER textbooks via modern machine translation algorithms. Key to these approaches is recognizing that while modern machine translation algorithms have developed significantly over the past few years, and they are still 90-95% perfect, their implementation makes them far more useful to students than the alternative human implemented translation effort at 100% implemented at a limited scale and with significant costs.

Integration of Values and Ethics in OER for Climate Change and the SDG’s

  • Speaker: Dr Suma Parahakaran, head of the Faculty of Education at Manipal Globalnxt University in Malaysia, and serves as a Visiting Professor at the American University of Sovereign Nations. She was also part of the task force for training teachers to integrate Values and Ethics into the Curriculum content for the UNHABITAT water education project. 
  • Summary: This presentation will highlight options for collaborative OER for learning communities. 

OER as a Social Justice tool, the case of digital accessibility

  • Speaker: Nicolas Simon, Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Criminology, and Social Work at Eastern Connecticut State University. 
  • Summary: By being cost-free, Open Educational Resources (OER) are electronically available for all students. The economic inclusion of all learners is the first step toward social justice. Another step is to use OER, which are specifically digitally accessible to include all types of learners. By using OER, we, educators, can promote and teach about digital accessibility. Then we can invite our students to use digital accessibility in the creation of new OER. In this sense, OER are good opportunities to advocate for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Social Justice.

Get the Balance Right: Using Mindfulness OER for Intentional Work and Life Practices

  • Speaker: Dr. Carolyn Stevenson is currently a full-time faculty member and faculty advisor for Purdue University Global, School of General Education, Department of Professional Studies, with over 23 years teaching and administrative experience in higher education at both the undergraduate and graduate level. She completed her Ed.D. from Roosevelt University, M.B.A. from Kaplan University, M.A. in Communications from Governor’s State University and B.A. in English from Northern Illinois University.
  • Summary: This session will discuss using mindfulness OER to foster a health work/life balance. The session will provide participants with resources and will include a brief meditation exercise.

 

Join us via Zoom at 4:00 PM UTC on 2 February 2023, ready to learn. Determine the meeting time in your local time zone

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CC at 20: CEO Catherine Stihler Reflects on 2022 and Where CC Is Headed Next

Last Friday (16 December 2022), Creative Commons proudly celebrated twenty years of CC licensing and all the groundbreaking collaboration it has enabled. As we look back on this remarkable journey, time seems to pass more quickly than ever — yet our gratitude for each milestone remains unwavering, as do words of thanks towards everyone who … Read More “CC at 20: CEO Catherine Stihler Reflects on 2022 and Where CC Is Headed Next”
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ACS Publications commits its entire hybrid journal portfolio to become transformative journals – American Chemical Society

The Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) has committed its full portfolio of more than 60 hybrid journals, which offers both open access and subscription-only content, to become Plan S-aligned transformative journals. This development represents a major step in ACS’ long-standing commitment to open science, signaling a future in which all publications are open access (OA), and ensures that more authors can continue to publish in their chosen journal.

OA Diamond Journals Study completed: Report emphasizes diversity and sustainable pathways for diamond Open Access

OPERAS is pleased to announce the publication of an in-depth report and associated recommendations arising from a study of open access journals across the world that are free for readers and authors, usually referred…

Help us get to know the open access journals and platforms that are free of charge for readers and authors

Scroll down to read this message in French, German, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese. We are pleased to invite you to fill in a survey dedicated to gaining in-depth understanding of open access journals that…

CC Search Celebrates Its First Birthday!

At the end of April, CC Search officially celebrated its first birthday! After releasing the search tool last year on April 30, we eagerly watched as it was put to use. Now, with a year behind us and over 2.8 million users across 230 countries and territories, we’re gathering and examining search data to better … Read More “CC Search Celebrates Its First Birthday!”
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CC Search Celebrates Its First Birthday!

At the end of April, CC Search officially celebrated its first birthday! After releasing the search tool last year on April 30, we eagerly watched as it was put to use. Now, with a year behind us and over 2.8 million users across 230 countries and territories, we’re gathering and examining search data to better … Read More “CC Search Celebrates Its First Birthday!”
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cOAlition S announces price transparency requirements | Plan S

Adhering to Plan’s S key principle of transparent pricing, cOAlition S publishes today its guidance on implementing price transparency when Open Access (OA) publication fees are applied. Specifically, cOAlition S announces that from July 1st, 2022 only publishers who provide data in line with one of the two endorsed price and service transparency frameworks will be eligible to receive OA publications funds from cOAlition S members. This covers funder contributions to any model of financing open access publications including, but not limited to, non-APC journals or platforms, article processing charges (APCs), transformative agreements, and transformative journals.

Reproductions of Public Domain Works Should Remain in the Public Domain

It has come to the attention of Creative Commons that there is an increased use of CC licenses by cultural heritage institutions on photographic reproductions and 3D scans of objects such as sculptures, busts, engravings, and inscriptions, among others, that are indisputably in the public domain worldwide. A recent example is the 3000-year-old Nefertiti bust … Read More “Reproductions of Public Domain Works Should Remain in the Public Domain”

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Don’t Let Science Publisher Elsevier Hold Knowledge for Ransom

It’s Open Access Week and we’re joining SPARC and dozens of other organizations this week to discuss the importance of open access to scientific research publications. 

An academic publisher should widely disseminate the knowledge produced by scholars, not hold it for ransom. But ransoming scientific research back to the academic community is essentially the business model of the world’s largest publisher of scientific journals: Elsevier.

In February of this year, after drawn-out negotiations broke down, the University of California terminated its subscription with Elsevier. A central sticking point in these negotiations was around open access: specifically Elsevier’s refusal to provide universal open access to UC research, a problem exacerbated by skyrocketing subscription fees.

This has been an ongoing fight, not just in California. Many academics (and EFF) believe that scholarly research most effectively advances scientific progress when it is widely available to the public, and not subject to the paywalls erected by publishers. Scientific research is a driving force behind technological innovations, medical breakthroughs, and policy decisions, and the bulk of it in the U.S. is publicly funded. When libraries, universities, individuals, and even researchers themselves have to pay to access academic work, we all suffer.

Elsevier boasts profit margins in excess of 30%, much of it derived from taxpayer dollars. Academics effectively volunteer their time to publishers to write articles, conduct peer review, and sit on editorial boards, and then publishers demand ownership of the copyright and control over dissemination. Universities and other institutions fund these researchers, and a mega-publisher like Elsevier reaps the benefits while trapping all of that work behind a paywall.

In response to this outdated and deleterious system, two UCSF researchers have started a petition to boycott Elsevier, calling on all academics to refuse to publish in Elsevier journals, peer-review their articles, or sit on their editorial boards (as many already have). They’ve also written a piece calling for a wider re-imagining of the academic publishing system, that’s more in line with an open access model. A large and growing number of scholars have signed the petition already.

This is far from the first time someone has called for a boycott of Elsevier. Efforts go back to 2012 with a call to action from mathematician Timothy Gowers which led to the “The Cost of Knowledge” campaign. Since then, boycotts have extended across entire countries, across Asia, Europe, and

Looking ahead: EIFL’s plans for open access

“Open scholarship is growing in importance as a way of ensuring that there is global participation in research, improved quality and efficiency of education and science, and faster economic and social progress.

Over the next two years, the EIFL Open Access Programme will support open scholarship by focusing on four key areas: open access policies, open science training for early career researchers, sustainable open access journals and repositories, and Open Educational Resources….”

Ubiquity Press to Pilot Open Source Repository Services

“We’re excited to announce that we are expanding our commitment to open access by providing hosted repositories. Starting in January 2018, we will be piloting two full-featured repository systems: Hyku and Invenio. Hyku is community-developed as a turnkey Samvera application and Invenio is developed by CERN. Our repositories will be open source, cloud-based, and fully integrated with our publishing and conference systems.”