To commemorate the event, NDU hosted Naeema Zarif, Creative Commons Regional Coordinator for the Arab World. Ms. Zarif met NDU President Fr. Walid Moussa, who expressed the importance of capitalizing on recent trends in open education to broaden access, foster innovation, and alleviate student textbook costs.

During the symposium, Dr. Fawzi Baroud, Assistant Vice President for Information Technology, described the history of  NDU’s involvement with open education beginning with his own participation in the U.S. State Department sponsored Open Book Project in 2014 and the continued collaboration with Creative Commons to create awareness and devise capacity building projects for an optimal OER culture within the university. He also traced the University’s future trajectory with regard to OER and the role it will play in advancing OER in Lebanon and the region. Ms. Zarif went on to speak about CC licenses in a panel titled “Creative Commons Licenses and the Future of Open Education in the Arab World.”

The symposium’s second day (titled “NDU Student Attitudes toward the Use of OER”) focused on the piloting of OER in a university-wide English course targeting close to 600 students in more than twenty sections across three campuses. Dr. Kamal Abouchedid, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, highlighted the integration of OER as a strategic initiative at NDU and as a means of fostering open education.

The design of the course was described by Dr. Sandra Doueiher, Assistant Professor and Coordinator of English. Joining the discussion from Denmark via Skype, Dr. Ena Hodzik spoke about the scholarship of OER, specifically about the issue of quality and utility in the integration of OER. Dr. Hodzik went on to explain that the student survey administered by NDU closely aligned with the major themes in the literature of OER.

Survey results were presented by Dr. George Abdelnour, Chair of the Department of English and Translation. The extensive survey sought student feedback on the use of OER based on general attitudes, effectiveness, quality, and learning outcomes of the resources used. By a 2 to 1 margin, he explained, students showed high levels of satisfaction and engagement with OER. The findings also showed a favorable inclination toward enrolling in courses using OER in the future.

The post OER Symposium held by affiliate team at NDU in Lebanon appeared first on Creative Commons.

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.

The post ‘Open In Action’ Requires Continuity and Solidarity with Fundamental Copyright Reform appeared first on Creative Commons.

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.

Scientist Erin McKiernan practices Open Science with a capital “O.” She is a researcher, an advocate for scientific diversity, and an educator on a mission to make science more inclusive and supportive. Erin’s work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Computational Neuroscience, and she has written book chapters and articles for a variety of media, including Scientific American and The Guardian. Her Shuttleworth Foundation sponsored project “Why Open Research?” is a lighthearted, educational take on the importance of open access scientific research. Erin lives and works in Mexico, where she is a professor in the Department of Physics, Biomedical Physics Program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

You are an international researcher who advocates for open science, open data, and other open systems. What initially interested you about working in research and education outside of the mainstream academic publishing climate? What drives you to continue doing this work?

I first became interested in open access while working as an adjunct professor at the University of Puerto Rico. I worked at one of the smaller campuses and we had limited access to the scientific literature. Struggling to access articles on a daily basis really puts the problem in perspective. Even more frustrating was watching my students struggle to access the literature they needed for their classes and research projects. I saw how it hindered their learning. Around the same time, I joined Twitter and began to connect with people in the open advocacy space. Through reading their tweets and blogs, I learned more about open access and open science in general, and found a very supportive community.

For the last four years, I have worked as an educator and researcher in Mexico, where we have similar problems with a lack of access to scientific information as those I saw while working in Puerto Rico. While I’m lucky to work now at a large public institution with relatively good access to the scientific literature, many other scientists and students in Mexico struggle every day to access the information they need. This, along with a belief that increasing transparency makes for better science, is what drives me to continue my open advocacy work.

The theme of this year’s Open Access week is “Open in Action.” How do you put “open in action?” How can other scientists and researchers put “open in action” through their research, teaching, and educational activities?

In 2014, I publicly pledged to publish my work only in open access journals. Since then, I have expanded this pledge and have committed to share not only my published articles but also my preprints, code, data, and laboratory notebooks when possible. You can find my full pledge here.

I understand not all researchers are comfortable with this level of sharing, especially at first, but I think all researchers can commit to simple actions. For example, you can upload author versions of your published articles to open repositories to ensure all your work is accessible regardless of the venue in which it was originally published. Around 80% of journals currently allow this type of self-archiving. Another simple action educators and researchers can take is to share their slide decks from classes or seminars on open platforms like Figshare. As researchers take these simple steps and start to see the benefits, I hope they’ll be encouraged to take even bigger steps (like data sharing) in the future.

What can open advocates do to begin to fix scholarly publishing?  

One of the best things advocates can do is lead by example. If you are a researcher and believe in the importance of open research, then share your articles, code, data, and tell people about your choices and successes. As people see you sharing and being successful, it will inspire them to do the same.

Another thing advocates can do is help educate their students and colleagues. Ask your colleagues where they plan to publish and why they chose that venue. Tell them about open publishing options in their field. Do this respectfully — the idea is not to preach or push, but rather to give them options. Many researchers are happy to explore new, more open venues, but simply aren’t aware of the wide variety of platforms that exist for sharing their work.

Finally, if you sit on employment, grant review, or promotion and tenure committees, speak out about how the current emphasis on journal-level metrics, like impact factor, is hurting researchers and not always rewarding the best science. Encourage these committees to look at article-level metrics instead, and to value the importance of open publishing and science communication.

Your project “Why Open Research” provides a long list of reasons why open publishing is good for researchers, their career, and the future of science. What are the some of the benefits you’ve seen personally from your work in open?

Yes, I built Why Open Research? as a fun and visual way to show researchers the benefits to them of sharing their work. In addition, together with an excellent group of collaborators in the open advocacy and research space, I also recently published an article in the journal eLife called “How open science helps researchers succeed.”

I would say the biggest way in which I’ve benefitted from openly sharing my work is increased visibility. I’ve been able to reach a larger audience that I would have if I published only in closed-access journals. People have reached out to me through my blog and Twitter to discuss my work, and even talk about potential collaborations. This increased visibility is particularly important for researchers in the early stages of their career, who are looking to build a name for themselves. I think open research has helped me do that. Another way I’ve benefitted is receiving feedback. I’ve put preprints out and received detailed feedback from others in the field that helped me improve my manuscripts before journal submission. In my view, the more eyes on my work before final publication, the better. Open platforms have helped me get more eyes on my work.

How can other researchers be better advocates for open science and open data? How can the scientific community come together to support each other in this worthy goal?

Again, it’s important to start with your little corner of the world. Begin by sharing your own work and speaking to your colleagues about your choices. Establish a set of best practices for managing and sharing data from your lab, use electronic notebooks that can be easily shared, tweet and blog about your research. Most importantly, teach your students to do the same. In this way, we ensure that the next generation of researchers sees open research practices as the default way of doing science rather than the exception to the rule.

The scientific community as a whole is diverse. We have people working all over the world, and under very different conditions. We have to be aware of these different conditions (limited or no access to high-speed internet, limited financial resources for research, institutions with varying levels of infrastructure), and think about how some of the solutions we propose for promoting open science and open data may be affected by these factors.

It is important that researchers from these countries and institutions be given a chance to voice their specific concerns when we’re discussing how to move forward. Some of the most relevant and innovative solutions for improving science and science communication are likely to come from developing countries.

The open advocacy space is perhaps even more diverse, with not only researchers at a variety of institutions, but also librarians, scholarly communication experts, policy makers, publishers, etc. I think the most important thing we can do is keep talking, and create more spaces (conferences, conference calls, community events) where we can overlap and talk about the unique challenges facing each of our communities.

The post Supporting a diverse community of scientists: How Erin McKiernan puts “Open in Action” appeared first on Creative Commons.

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.

The post Open Access Policy In Practice: A Perspective from the Wellcome Trust appeared first on Creative Commons.

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!

The post Open Access Week 2016: A Drumbeat for ‘Open In Action’ appeared first on Creative Commons.

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.

The post Help us make a giant leap against cancer: Biden presents five-year Cancer Moonshot plan appeared first on Creative Commons.

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.

The post United Nations Report Calls for Open Access to Research to Improve Global Health appeared first on Creative Commons.

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.

The post Cancer Moonshot Should Prioritize Open Access to Publicly-funded Research appeared first on Creative Commons.

I am Dr. Roshan Kumar Karn, a medical graduate from Institute of Medicine, Tribhuwan University Teaching Hospital. I established an organization called Open Access Nepal as an affiliate chapter of SPARC and the Right to Research Coalition. We are dedicated to promoting the policies and principles of Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data.

In March 2016, the second Institute for Open Leadership (IOL2) was a fantastic gathering organized by Creative Commons. I had the immense opportunity to attend this event, and the discussions that I had with the mentors and global participants still echoes in my thoughts.

After we launched Open Access Nepal in 2014, we’ve been advancing open access and open educational resources in Nepal through different events. IOL2 was the best podium for me to gain a better understanding about open licenses as well as use and re-use of open resources. This knowledge and experience has helped me to work on an open licensing policy within my institute, and at the ministry level.

After IOL2, Open Access Nepal took three approaches to advance open access to scholarly communication. One was to pursue the establishment of a Creative Commons affiliate in Nepal in order to raise awareness about the use and reuse of openly licensed resources.

Institute of Medicine Open Access Contract with Faculty and Grantees

The second approach was to develop an institutional policy that promotes research publications in open journals, thus advancing science, technology and innovation. As a medical doctor it was imperative for me to create a policy within my institute, which produces much of the medical research in Nepal. Most of the faculty and professors in my institute want to opt out of an open access approach, preferring a conventional model of publishing which restricts access to research and scientific publication. The consequence of this is that the next generation of students and early career researchers can’t get access to this research. Therefore, I worked with the administration to “give teeth” to open publishing practices by suggesting that promotion or contract renewal clauses contain a preference for open access publishing. We also made few changes in the wording of contracts signed between faculty, grantees, and the Institute of Medicine. After IOL2, we felt that the language of the contract needed to be stronger to ensure that it was mandatory for the faculty and grantees to publish their research in Open Access journals and deposit their research in the Central Open Access Repository of Nepal.

(The table below written in Nepali is the copy of promotion/contract renewal clause devised by my institute.)

Changes made in the clauses regarding promotion and contract renewal (Translated from Nepali into English)

• At least 3 research publications will be mandatory for the promotion of permanent faculty and 2 research publications will be required for contract renewal of temporary personnel for the first renewal and promotion.
• Faculty members have the liberty to publish their research articles in any journal worldwide but a faculty will be eligible for the marks needed for promotion and contract renewal only if their research publication is openly available and a copy of that article is deposited in the Journal of Institute of Medicine (JIOM).
• The materials covered by this clause must have an applicable Creative Commons License including proper attributions. The reuse of already present content will make use of the most current version of CC BY license.

Open Access Policy at the Ministry of Education

The third approach will likely be the most impactful measure to advance openness in science and education: We are currently drafting an open access policy that will be presented to the Ministry of Education in Nepal. We have had a series of informal talks about the things that could be included (listed below) in the national policy to advance open access to scientific publications. These include:

• Open Access policies and principles
• Formulation of open access policy guidelines/toolkit
• Components of Open Access
• Defining the availability of scientific publications in open journals
• Use of open licenses along with proper attributions
• Definite contract between grant recipient from the Govt. of Nepal and the appropriate dissemination of their research
• Intellectual property rights
• Open Access training to students, early career researchers, journal representatives and faculties
• Use/Re-Use of existing open resources
• Making resources openly available
• Quality standards/assessment of grantees’ research
• Measures of making open access sustainable
• Awareness about Open Access, OER (local events, in campus programs, national level events)

We are drafting a national policy to address all the above issues, in addition to other that will make “open” the default option in Nepal.

I am very grateful to Creative Commons, fellows, mentors, and the Open Policy Network for providing me this great opportunity to attend the IOL2. I look forward to any feedback and suggestions you have about my open policy project.

The post Building an Institutional Open Access Policy In Nepal appeared first on Creative Commons.

The interdisciplinary artist Caroline Woolard engages with political economy and activism through radically innovative collaborative projects. Through “existing commoning projects like gifting, lending, borrowing, and sharing of land, labor, and capital,” Woolard’s work confronts the economic precarity of the present moment through a variety of media.

As a “cultural producer whose interdisciplinary work facilitates social imagination at the intersection of art, urbanism, and political economy,” Woolard’s work is collaborative, confrontational, and cooperative, drawing on a variety of experiences and voices.

Woolard’s newest work, “Of Supply Chains,” will be released this month on the project’s website.

How do you understand “the commons”?

I define “the commons” as shared resources that are managed by and for the people who use those resources. Creative Commons does an excellent job of bringing the Free Culture Movement to everyday life, as image rights are now understood in relationship to the commons. That said, I believe Silvia Federici when she writes that most things we call “commons” today are in fact “transitional commons” because in a true commons, the collective management of resources would be respected by, and even surpass, state and federal law.

Can you discuss the use of political economies in your work and how it relates to the concept of the commons?

If “the commons” refers to the ways in which people share and manage resources together, then the commons is always a political, and economic, concept. Historically, the commons have been enclosed upon by state governance and by privatization. Today, the commons are enclosed upon by neoliberalism, what cultural theorist Leigh Claire La Berge describes as “the private capture of public wealth”. It is my hope that my art and design work can support existing commoning practices like the gifting, lending, borrowing, and sharing of land, labor, and capital. While artists who represent commoning in paintings or photographs might provide necessary space for reflection about the commons, in my work I employ one of two strategies: 1) co-creating living spaces for commoning, or 2) making objects and artworks for existing commons-based organizations. In other words, I try to support the commons, rather than represent the commons.

Because I aim to communicate across social spheres, I make multi-year, research-based, site-specific projects that circulate in contemporary art institutions as well as in urban development, critical design, and social entrepreneurship settings. Though I am often cited as a socially engaged artist, I consider myself to be a cultural producer whose interdisciplinary work facilitates social imagination at the intersection of art, urbanism, and political economy.

I create installations and social spaces for encounters with fantasies of cooperation. Police barricades become beds. Money is erased in public. A clock ticks for ninety-nine years. Public seats attach to stop sign posts. Cafe visitors use local currency. Office ceilings hold covert messages. Ten thousand students attend classes by paying teachers with barter items. Statements about arts graduates are read on museum plaques. My work is research-based and site-specific. I alter objects to call forth new norms, roles, and rules. A street corner, a community space, a museum, an office, or a school become sites for collective reimagining.

To make this shift from object to group, I concern myself with duration and political economy. When I source materials, invite joint-work, share or deny decision-making power, and shape future markets for each work, a community of practice emerges. Experience becomes a criterion of knowledge.

To the conventional labels of Title, Author(s), Materials, Dimensions, Date, and Provenance, I add Duration, forms of Property, Labor, Transactions, Enterprise, and Finance. Objects become materializations of collective debate; entry points for encounters with fantasies of cooperation.

The objects I make cannot be disentangled from their economic and social lives. My Work Dress is available for barter only. My Statements increase in price according to student loan rates. Artists Report Back is made by BFAMFAPhD, a group that accepts community contributions. I understand art as mode of inquiry that expands beyond exhibition and toward life cycle; from display to production, consumption, and surplus allocation. I begin each project with an invitation. I facilitate an experience. A group gathers. I share and develop leadership. The project becomes a group effort, and the objects multiply. The objects are known in the group and shown much later.

You often work collaboratively with other artists. Do you see collaboration as essential to your process? How did you come to that conclusion?

I often work collaboratively because it allows me to refine my ideas in debate and in encounters with difference – difference of experience, of perspective, of values. I believe that a diversity of opinions strengthens projects because collaborators are challenged to confront their individual assumptions and either come to agreement as a group or make space to consent to individual expression or dissensus.

In collaboration, we often take time to speak about our individual and collective approaches to allocating time and money in projects. As collaborators attempt to agree upon which resources to share, collaboration becomes a conversation about political economy. We often ask: Which resources – time, money, space – are most important to us right now? How will we share the resources we accumulate together? Who has more time, space, or money in the group, and which institutions uphold this reality? By practicing shared work and shared decision making in a collaborative project, an economy of shared time and resources emerges. Practitioners of collaboration also become practitioners of solidarity economies, looking at shared livelihoods as always already part of shared production.

Money and debt is a loaded topic for artists, and yet you face debt and economic precarity head on in projects like “BFAMFAPHD.” How did that project come about? Why did you decide to take on that topic?

In the classroom, arts educators confront the socially idealized occupation of the cultural producer and the frequent disavowal of a relationship between cultural production and the contemporary political economy. It is my aim to articulate existing economies of cultural production as well as plausible futures of cooperation in art. I do this in my teaching, scholarship, and independent work. Most recently, my co-authored articles (On the Cultural Value Debate) and teaching tools (Of Supply Chains) speak to these concerns. In Of Supply Chains, co-authored with Susan Jahoda and co-designed with Emilio Reynaldo Martinez Poppe, a recent graduate of Cooper Union, we write:

“We aim to articulate the relationship between art making, pedagogy, and political economy. We believe that practices of collaboration and solidarity economies are foundational for contemporary visual arts, design, and new media education. ” Our text, workbook, and game are online this month. For now, you can see an early version of our game here.

You have described NYCREIC as “creative commons for land.” Can you elaborate on that statement?

Just as Creative Commons provides a legal framework for authors to easily share their intellectual property, I believe that we need an entity to provide legal frameworks for land owners to share their land easily. This is what I would call a “Creative Commonwealth.” The New York City Real Estate Investment Cooperative, and so many initiatives related to community land trusts, could be considered examples of projects that would utilize the Creative Commonwealth framework, if it existed. Janelle Orsi at the Sustainable Economies Law Center, is working on something of this nature with the Agrarian Trust.

How do you see investment in affordable physical space as essential to a commons?

Since co-founding and co-directing OurGoods.org and TradeSchool.coop in 2008 to enable resource sharing, I’ve seen how solidarity economy platforms build resilience and mutual aid — often for those of us on the privileged side of the digital divide. I’ve also seen that online platforms are not enough. All people need affordable space, so that they can take risks and fail. Where will we meet to swap or share goods and services without affordable space? Ensuring affordable space is the only way creativity and innovation can occur. And so I started thinking: How might we as artists utilize the strengths of a networked information era to cooperatively finance, acquire, and manage space? What can artists do to help ensure affordable space and reduce displacement?

You’ve used open licensing in a variety of projects like “Queer Rocker” and “Origin of the World Dress.” Why did you decide to open source your work? Have there been any surprising outcomes?

The Queer Rocker is an example of what I call a Free/Libre/Open Source Systems and Art project. I made the designs, files, and assembly process for the Queer Rocker available for use and modification because I learn by doing, and by uniting research with action. I want to furnish gathering spaces with objects that are as imaginative as the conversations that occur in those spaces. I want to contribute to an economy of social justice, solidarity, sustainability, and cooperation. I hope to add spaces of reflection and healing to social movements, so many of which are, at present, focused on immediate protest and progress. Many students, activists, and grassroots organizations cannot afford to purchase furniture, but they may have time to create things with the materials around them.

My aim with open source projects is that through communal production and alteration, a radical politics will emerge; a politics of cooperation.

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