It’s Open Access Week 2016. Open Access Week is an annual week-long event that highlights the importance of sharing scientific and scholarly research and data. The goal is to educate people on the benefits of open publishing, advocate for changes to policy and practice, and build a community to collaborate on these issues. This year’s theme is open in action.

Today marks the conclusion of another productive, informative Open Access Week. There were dozens of in-person workshops, online webinars, blog posts, and other actions from institutions and individuals all over the world aiming to educate and advocate for a more open system of producing and sharing research.

On Monday we took a look at the increasing drumbeat around improving access to publicly funded research. On Tuesday we published an interview with Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust, exploring the perspective of philanthropy in supporting open access publishing. Wednesday we launched a beta version of our Termination of Transfer Tool, a project that empowers authors to learn about whether and when they can regain rights from publishers in order to share their works on an open access basis. We also published an interview with scientist and advocate Erin McKiernan about her work for open science. On Thursday we hosted a Twitter chat with members of the library and scientific community to talk about some of the problems with the current scholarly publishing system, and what we can do about it.

It’s clear that our work and advocacy in open access can’t end today if we expect positive change in support of improved access to scientific and scholarly research.

As Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley wrote in WIRED:

If it wasn’t so well-established, the traditional model of academic publishing would be considered scandalous. Every year, hundreds of billions in research and data are funded, in whole or in part, with public dollars. We do this because we believe that knowledge is for the public good, but the public gets very little access to the fruits of its investment.

It’s a shame that our movement needs to argue with policymakers that the public should get access to research that it pays for. It’s a shame that instead of experimenting with an “open by default” approach to sharing scientific information, in much of policy and practice the status quo remains closed.

The work of open access needs to keep in clear view the ultimate goals of science and scholarship—a fundamental search for knowledge—that is now supercharged for sharing and collaboration to solve the world’s toughest scientific and social problems.

But open access is not just about working to flip the default from closed to open.

There are increasing threats to access to information, education, and freedom of expression. Just last week in Uruguay, 14 people were convicted and sentenced to prison for the crime of making copies of educational resources for noncommercial use. In Colombia, student Diego Gomez is being prosecuted for the crime of sharing a research paper online. A copyright “reform” proposal has been introduced by the European Commission, but many of its provisions do little to improve the rights of users and the public. Instead, much of the proposal reinforces protectionist measures for incumbent rights holders, while providing only limited benefits for researchers, teachers, internet users, and consumers.

The open access movement should cooperate and collaborate with related communities of action, including the important work to rebalance the underlying systems of copyright to benefit creativity, innovation, and access to knowledge.

We’d like to thank SPARC for leading this week’s activities, Authors Alliance for their partnership on the Termination of Transfer tool, and the countless libraries, universities, advocacy organizations, and individuals who participated in Open Access Week.

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It’s Open Access Week 2016. Open Access Week is an annual week-long event that highlights the importance of sharing scientific and scholarly research and data. Its goal is to educate people on the benefits of open publishing, advocate for changes to policy and practice, and build a community to collaborate on these issues. This year’s theme is open in action. Today we are exploring open access policy within philanthropy by interviewing Robert Kiley from the Wellcome Trust. From brokering the Bermuda Principles for immediate sharing of DNA sequence data in 1996 to being the first funder to mandate open access to our funded publication in 2005, Wellcome has been at the forefront of open research for over two decades.

CC: Can you describe the Wellcome Trust and your role within the organisation?

RK: Wellcome exists to improve health for everyone by helping great ideas to thrive. We’re a global charitable foundation, both politically and financially independent. We support scientists and researchers, take on big problems, fuel imaginations, and spark debate.

I’m currently on secondment from the Wellcome Library and am the Development Lead for Open Research. In this role I’m responsible for developing a strategy for the Wellcome Trust which will set out what we could do to move the needle in making research outputs findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable – the FAIR principles.

The Wellcome Trust has had an open access policy in place for several years now, and other philanthropic grantmakers such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Ford Foundation have adopted similar policies that require open licensing for the outputs of grant funding. Can you describe the motivation behind the adoption of a CC BY open access policy for Wellcome funded research?

We believe that the full research and economic benefit of published content will only be realised when there are no restrictions on access to, and re-use of, this information.

When we first setup our open access policy in 2005, we simply required authors to agree that articles would be made available online. We didn’t specify an open license that needed to be used. Over time, we began to understand that requiring an open license would help realise the full benefits of the research. From a practical perspective, mandating an open license helps us communicate the access and re-use rights, thus making it easier for downstream users to understand how they can use it. We’d also seen that some of our research had been published on a commercial website and had been subject to a takedown from the rightsholder. By adopting an open licensing policy we could make sure that the research funded by Wellcome is widely available without these troubles.

Related to this, open licensing allows for our research to be share beyond the traditional publication channels, and can help reach audiences where they are. So, for example, an article studying the effects of, say, breastfeeding, published under open access licence, can be posted on other platforms like Facebook or Mumsnet in order to reach the communities who get their information there. This is made possible with an open license like CC BY.

Equally, openly licensed content can be translated without first seeking permission from the rights holder.  Again, this helps to increase the reach (and potential impact) of the research we fund.  

Following on from that question, do you have thoughts on the intersection of open policy adoption between private funders like Wellcome and public research funding bodies? Do you see learnings or best practices that could be exchanged between these various funders, and whether there are particular considerations that should to be addressed so that the research that comes out of each funding stream is maximally useful for those that need it?

In some ways it might be easier for private organisations like Wellcome and Gates to adopt progressive open access policies. But from the government perspective the argument for open access is clear. And in the UK, the CC BY requirement applies to all research funded through the Research Councils UK (RCUK) when an APC is levied.

The government wants taxpayer-funded research to be openly reusable. It makes good economic sense, and can drive innovation and promote access to knowledge.

From CC’s point of view, we know that open licensing is only one aspect of a successful open access policy implementation, and that there are many other policy considerations and practicalities that need to be aligned. These include providing education and guidance for authors on publishing and licensing options, repository and deposit requirements, attaching metadata to promote search and discovery, data management, and policy compliance. Wellcome’s recent communication regarding publisher requirements seems to reflect a similar need for a holistic approach for OA policy implementation. Can you explain a bit more about these requirements, and why Wellcome decided to adopt them?

We make our Open Access funding available to institutions as block grants, and every year those institutions report back to us information on the outputs of that funding. We analyse the data, so we can determine how much an average APC charge was, and where the research was published. We’re also able to ascertain whether the institutions are following the requirements attached to the funding, for example whether an article was made available through in the relevant repository (Europe PMC), whether the appropriate license was used, etc.

Our analysis showed that in a number of cases where Wellcome was paying the fees, we weren’t getting what we paid for.  The the 2014-15 analysis showed that  around 30% of the papers were not fully compliant with our open access policy requirements. As a result, we recently created a set of publisher requirements, which makes explicit the things we expect from publishers when Wellcome pays an APC. For example, publishers must commit to the ongoing responsibility of keeping the articles up-to-date, including noting corrections, substantial revisions, license changes, and retractions.

There are huge opportunities—and many challenges—regarding the transformation of scholarly communications in service of improving access to research that could help solve global health problems. Is there a particular project or policy aspect that Wellcome is most interested in pursuing related to this objective?

We recently launched Wellcome Open Research, a platform for our grantees to rapidly publish any output from their research. This includes everything from typical research articles and data sets to case reports, notes, protocols, and even negative results. The platform is built on the F1000Research publishing model, which works on a post-publication peer review system.

Articles are submitted to the platform and checked to verify authorship and pass other applicable considerations, such as ethics clearance, plagiarism detection and data availability. Once it’s passed these minimal checks, the article is formally published and is assigned a citation and DOI. Publication will typically happen within 5-7 days. After that, peer review begins. Everything is done in public, and the outputs are openly licensed—usually CC BY for articles, and CC0 for data.

Wellcome is also supporting the work of ASAPbio (and others) to encourage the sharing of preprints in the life and biological sciences.  We believe that sharing of preprints provides researchers with a fast way to disseminate their work, establish priority of their discoveries, and obtain feedback. They also offer a more current understanding of an investigator’s work.

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Today kicks off Open Access Week 2016. Open Access Week is an annual week-long event that highlights the importance of sharing scientific and scholarly research and data. Its goal is to educate people on the benefits of open publishing, advocate for changes to policy and practice, and build a community to collaborate on these issues. This year’s theme is open in action.

For nearly 15 years, Creative Commons licenses and legal tools have been used to share scholarly articles and data on more open terms than the standard “all rights reserved” copyright. In addition to the legal machinery that helps communicate the rights to use and reuse open access research, the movement around Creative Commons and open access has spread through academia, libraries, science, education, and public policy.

What’s been going on in Open Access over the last year? Here’s a just a brief sampling:

• CC’s Ryan Merkley thinks it’s ludicrous that the public gets such poor access to the fruits of its massive taxpayer investments in publicly funded research. Articles in The Guardian, Forbes, ArsTechnica, and The Wall Street Journal wondered the same. And Robert Darnton calls on the new Librarian of Congress to champion open access to publicly-funded research in the U.S.

• Vice President Biden launched the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, which seeks to make ten years’ worth of progress on cancer research in half that time. As part of that initiative, CC continues to call for immediate open access to all publicly-funded cancer research and data. Specifically, we offered four things we can do now to unlock the cure for cancer.

• The United Nations urged governments, universities, and funders to prioritize open access to research as a means to improve global health.

• The European Union continues to push ahead in support of open science, and the Commission wants scientific data to be ‘open by default’ as a requirement for future research grants.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation launched the Reclaim Invention project to push for reforms in university technology transfer practices. CC is supporting the project as natural complement to related open access and open education initiatives in higher education.

• OASPA showed increasing growth of fully open access journals, and released an informative guide on best practices in licensing and attribution.

• More research was published that showed that publishing under open access can help researchers succeed by increasing citations and media attention, inviting potential collaborators, and opening the door to future job and funding opportunities.

Be sure to check out openaccessweek.org for more information on this week’s campaign, and make a commitment to put ‘open in action’.

Follow along with the Creative Commons blog, Twitter, and Facebook this week, and be sure to tag and share your posts with the #OAweek hashtag. We’ll be supporting Open Access Week with posts, interviews, and other activities.

Here we go!

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Curious about what’s going on with European copyright? Need a refresher on what the Commission’s new copyright proposal means for you? Don’t worry! We’re here to help!

• Read our letter and blog post to encourage an improved proposal.
• Check out our summary of the proposal from last month.
• Follow our friends at Communia and read their policy recommendations for a more humane copyright in the EU
• Participate in Mozilla’s #cczerohero campaign by uploading your photos to Flickr with a CC0 license

If you are able to come, the Creative Commons community will be at the Mozilla Festival in London from October 28-30.

Come find us! Tweet @creativecommons during the event or follow the #mozfest hashtag to learn about how we’re coming together for copyright reform in the EU.

Let’s be sure the changes to EU copyright don’t break the web. Stand with us and our partners if you believe it’s time to #fixcopyright.

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Today Vice President Biden announced a comprehensive plan for his Cancer Moonshot initiative, which seeks to achieve a decade’s worth of progress on cancer research in five years.

As an invited participant in the Moonshot, we commend the Vice President’s radical approach to solving this crucial issue. In April, Biden referenced Ryan Merkley’s viral article in Wired, citing a need for better collaboration and the sharing of cancer data. Today’s announcement underscores the initiative’s commitment to open data, open access, and research. The “audacious, creative, and disruptive approaches” to innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and information sharing through crowdsourcing are a direct result of the advocacy work from the open community.

The Cancer Moonshot report acknowledges existing challenges to making progress against cancer, including “a lack of open access and rapid sharing of research data and results.” Biden’s report recognizes the need for open collaboration, open access to research and data, and the need for education and incentives to change existing models.

In June, we made four recommendations to the Cancer Moonshot to accelerate the speed and probability for new cancer treatments and cures:

1. Make open access the default for cancer research articles and data.
2. Take embargo periods on research articles and data to zero.
3. Build and reward a culture of sharing and collaboration.
4. Share cancer education and training materials as open educational resources.

As Biden writes, the Moonshot seeks to “unlock scientific advances through open publication,” including the creation of a Genomic Data Commons, which has already accumulated 32,000 patients in a few months. The Genomic Data Commons holds great potential for a more open data landscape and the number of people served has already proven its efficacy.

At today’s presentation, Vice President Biden reiterated the importance of access to information about cancer for researchers, doctors, patients, and families. Further, he said that cancer has now reached an “inflection point,” and that the research and treatment system needs to be reimagined for the 21st century.

It is crucial that this transformation involves reforms that truly support free, immediate open access to publicly-funded cancer research and data. We believe that open sharing and collaboration can begin to address many of the inefficiencies in the existing research and dissemination cycle that the report addresses and seeks to solve.

As the Moonshot Initiative continues, we look forward to joining the many voices involved in order to ensure that we reach our shared goal: Eliminating cancer within our lifetime.

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In an ideal world, the Directive would have provided for progressive policy changes to serve the goals of a unified digital marketplace across Europe. It would have jumpstarted economic activity, championed innovative digital technologies and services, and protected consumers and access to information. It would have expanded opportunities for European businesses, cultural heritage institutions, educators, and the research community.

The Commission’s plan does little to advance these goals, instead making the European copyright framework more complex and unfit for the digital age. With the proposal from the Commission on the table, the legislative focus shifts to the EU Member States, the European Parliament, and the Council of the European Union. Several Member States are currently engaged in brief national-level public consultations in response to the Commission’s proposition.

Creative Commons published a letter that outlines the primary areas of concern, discusses potential policy solutions, and offers continued support to Member States as they solicit public input that will inform the forthcoming legislative proceedings.

Over 30 of our international affiliate teams and associated organizations are signatories to the letter. We are working with CC affiliates across Europe to provide feedback and ideas to the ongoing consultations.

Let’s work together to improve the Commission’s disappointing proposal. Now is the time for Europe to redouble its efforts to make positive changes to copyright that will benefit all stakeholders, including creators, users, and the public interest.

Creative Commons Letter to European Member States on Commission Copyright Proposal [PDF]

Screwdriver And Wrench by To Uyen, CC BY 3.0 US
Copyright by Marek Polakovic, CC BY 3.0 US

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Last month the United Nations released a report with recommendations on how to improve innovation and access to health technologies. The panel’s charge called for it to “recommend solutions for remedying the policy incoherence between the justifiable rights of inventors, international human rights law, trade rules and public health in the context of health technologies.”

Of particular interest are the panel’s suggestions for managing intellectual property generated from publicly-funded research. From the report:

Limiting access to academic discoveries can obstruct follow-on innovation and force taxpayers to pay twice for the benefits of publicly-funded research. Strong, enforceable policies on data sharing and data access should be a condition of public grants.

Public funders of research must require that knowledge generated from such research be made freely and widely available through publication in peer-reviewed literature and seek broad, online public access to such research.

Universities and research institutions that receive public funding should adopt policies and approaches that catalyse innovation and create flexible models of collaboration that advance biomedical research and generate knowledge for the benefit of the public.

The recommendations clearly urge funders and universities to implement policies that ensure broad access to research publications and data produced through public grant monies. The policies should include provisions that clearly communicate liberal re-use rights to publications and data (for example by requiring CC BY for published articles and CC0 for datasets). It’s also crucial for the policies to address deposit and hosting options, training for grantees and program officers, and compliance requirements.

One aim of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals is “to achieve universal health coverage and provide access to safe and affordable medicines and vaccines for all.” Improving access to and re-use of publicly-funded scientific and medical research is an important step toward realizing this global goal.

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Vice President Biden is leading the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, which seeks to make ten years’ worth of progress on cancer research in half that time. We think an important part to finding cures is changing policy to improve access to cancer research.

Our recommendations include:

1. Make open access the default for cancer research articles and data. All government-funded cancer research articles should be fully open and reusable, which means they must be published under an open license such as CC BY. Datasets should be shared in the public domain under CC0.
2. Take embargo periods on research articles and data to zero. All government-funded research articles and data should be made available
   immediately upon publication.
3. Build and reward a culture of sharing and collaboration. Agencies funding cancer research should incentivize researchers to share their data and articles widely by actively rewarding this behavior in their promotion and funding processes.
4. Share cancer education and training materials as open educational resources. Beyond research and data, there’s a huge opportunity to provide access to the best, most up-to-date, most effective cancer education resources for teaching and training medical professionals, developed in a collaborative environment.

After collecting feedback from the public about actions that would speed up the probability of discovery for new cancer treatments and cures, the Blue Ribbon Panel presented its report to the Moonshot team in September. It offers 10 recommendations for accelerating progress against cancer. The suggestions are quite diverse and expansive, including building a national cancer data ecosystem, intensifying research on the major drivers of childhood cancers, and developing new cancer technologies.

The Cancer Moonshot Initiative is now well-positioned to offer strong recommendations for progressive policy changes that will ensure that researchers have broad, open access to publicly-funded cancer research, datasets, and tools.

Creative Commons has committed to provide open educational resources and tools that will support researchers, funders, medical professionals, professors, and patients as they build open and collaborative communities for cancer research. We will engage, educate, and support federal departments and agencies, cancer research centers, universities, nonprofits, and foundations that fund cancer research to adopt and implement open policies that require knowledge to be openly licensed and freely-available without restrictions or embargoes.

Congratulations to the Blue Ribbon Panel for pushing this important work ahead. Now it’s up to the Moonshot team to show its commitment to supporting innovative practices, projects, and policies that will lead to improved cancer treatments, and eventual cures.

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Today the Marrakesh Treaty—the international agreement to improve access to copyrighted works for the blind and visually impaired—goes into effect.

The treaty has been discussed at the World Intellectual Property Organization since 2008 and was signed in Marrakesh in June 2013.  It was finally ratified by the required 20 states , and today, three months later, it goes into effect.

Countries that have ratified the treaty must provide for a domestic copyright exception law that allows for the creation of accessible versions of books and other copyrighted works for visually impaired persons. In addition, the treaty permits the import and export of accessible versions of copyrighted works.

According to the World Blind Union, only 1-7% of the world’s books are ever made available in versions accessible to the visually impaired. Copyright law has contributed to this problem because the default rules typically prohibit such adaptations.

The implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty is a vital step to improve access to books and other copyrighted material for those who are blind, visually impaired, or otherwise print disabled. These protections are long overdue; the right to read should be guaranteed for everyone.

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We believe that this is a timely opportunity to introduce positive changes to copyright that will support users and the public, such as adopting a flexible use exception like fair use. Our community looks forward to providing ideas and feedback during the reform process.

Letter of support for balanced Colombian copyright law reform [English]
Carta para apoyar una reforma equilibrada al derecho de autor en Colombia [Spanish]

The signatories below are writing to you regarding the proposed updates to copyright law in Colombia that will be introduced in order to implement the U.S.-Colombia Trade Agreement. We are concerned that these changes will only further tip the balance of copyright toward the interests of rights holders, while ignoring necessary protections for the public domain, as well as for users, consumers, and the general public.

We understand that the proposed changes would include increasing copyright terms  for some types of rights holders, and adopting an instrument to mirror the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We urge the Congress to take this opportunity to provide for crucial balances to copyright that protect the rights of users. In the fast-changing digital and online environment, the Congress should consider introducing a flexible exception to copyright that echoes the regulation of countries that have adopted “fair use” or “fair dealing” exceptions.

It has been our experience that to ensure the maximum benefits to both culture and the economy in this digital age, the scope and shape of copyright law need to be reviewed. Now is the time for the Congress to ensure that appropriate and necessary exceptions and limitations are updated in order to protect and support users, access to information, and creativity.

Creative Commons Colombia
Creative Commons
Fundación Karisma
COMMUNIA International Association on the Public Domain
Centrum Cyfrowe
Creative Commons Peru
Creative Commons Uruguay
Kennisland
Creative Commons Netherlands
Creative Commons Ireland
Creative Commons Ukraine
Creative Commons Indonesia
Creative Commons Portugal
Creative Commons UK
Australian Digital Alliance
Creative Commons Chile
Creative Commons Australia
Creative Commons Nigeria
Creative Commons Belarus

Screwdriver And Wrench by To Uyen, CC BY 3.0 US
Copyright by Marek Polakovic, CC BY 3.0 US

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