According to Arturo Rodolfo Sanchez, a member of the ATLAS community and outreach team, “The large hadron collider is running now at 13 TeV. This is an energy level never seen before in a collider.” This exciting development is built on the power of open science – at ATLAS, data sharing and an open, innovative approach to information collaboration has become a fundamental part of this important scientific community.

This year, ATLAS decided to release the data from 100 trillion proton-proton particles to the public under CC0, the first release of 8 TeV data. More than 3000 scientists from 174 countries work on ATLAS, and more are joining every day. At the CERN open data platform educational portal, scientists, educators, and science enthusiasts can access the work of thousands of scientists working together to hunt for the Higgs-Boson particle and other important scientific discoveries.

Sanchez’s vision of science is open, and he believes that CERN’s is as well – working with Creative Commons, he describes a new kind of research organization built with the power of community. Though the 7000 ton ATLAS detector in the large hadron collider lives “100 meters below a small Swiss village,” the data moves far beyond the confines of the institution, providing insights and experimentation to the entire world.

This interview was conducted with the assistance of Noam Prywes, a post-doctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Why is open data and open science important to CERN? Why have you chosen to use CC0 for this dataset in particular?

Open Data, open software and open hardware are very important for us! It is part of our policy in the ATLAS Collaboration and the other Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. This is important for us because we are a scientific community and our main goal is to look for answers as humankind, not as an institution. We are also funded by taxpayers – CERN as an organisation and facility, and the experiments like ATLAS (part of the LHC) use public sector funding.

Independently of the member country, most of them have as policy/law to publicly release any final result, publication, dataset, and conclusion that public funding research institutions generate. In ATLAS, we develop resources (datasets and tools) that can be used mainly for educational projects carrying out by ATLAS and not-ATLAS members. Of course, this is not a restriction! We don’t want to limit the use that a person (educator, scientific, artist, etc…) could have with the data.

There are a lot of people out there with many different ways of thinking, so who knows what can be possible or not possible with those resources? This is why we went for the CC0 license for the datasets released by ATLAS on its Open Data project. The same has been done by the CERN Open Data project. I can complement my answer by mentioning several projects from CERN or CERN groups:

• Root: A modular scientific software framework
• CERN Open Data project for the release of experiment data and resources
• ATLAS OpenData and educational resources, our platform!
• CERN Open Hardware Project
• Invenio and Indico: Very successful projects born at CERN: and
• Open Lab: Another training and educational project where public and private sector come together

What’s the relationship between your initiative and other open data and open access initiatives in scientific communities? How are you working together? Is there anything unique about your relationship to open access that’s different from other open science initiatives?

As you can see, the CERN community is keen on the involvement of a high number of people, countries, institutions and research fields involved. Therefore, any project that includes two or more groups working at CERN or in CERN-hosted experiments is already an international enterprise!

Let me give you the ATLAS example: we are an experiment with ~3000 members coming from more than 120 universities around the world. Many of them are senior professors in their home institutions. Thousands of students can be or are already involved in ATLAS educational, training or outreach activities. This leaves us with the possibility of having a professor in a North American university using public data to write some code to train her new master’s student. At the same time, an ATLAS college in a German university is running a complete laboratory course in particle physics using the ATLAS public data together with a combination of public software and custom code. Meanwhile, a group of Latin-American ATLAS members are presenting public seminars and running exercises for high school students using public apps and public ATLAS data.

Since CERN is so international, how do you choose how you release data and publish research? Is open access a more acute concern because of national boundaries? What about funding sources? Are there countries that demand open access as a precondition for money? Has that influenced scientists from different locales?

The way to release data is in a worldwide common framework: on a web platform, with a lot of files to create the best documentation possible.

This last step is in fact the most difficult one, so, we run local trainings as well, with different audiences in order to get feedback and repair the holes and make the web and user interfaces better every day.

The fact that CERN is a multinational organisation with so many funding governments and institutions consolidate the openness of the research and the resources products of those. Many legal aspects are taking into account and I am do not know all the details, but the spirit is to share and be as useful as possible.

CERN is in such an individual position in terms of the science it does, so what kind of innovative measures are you taking to publicize this science? How are you highlighting the work that scientists and communities are doing with the published data?

We have been working very hard in the communication side by using every possible media out there to communicate results, activities, tutorials, and even how physicists spend their time. This is done by the CERN community and included in each of the experiments now. Our presence in social media is strong (at least for a scientific community!) and more and more people are aware of what we do and why it is important. Students around the world come to visit CERN and the experiments, and some others visit the place virtually. In the case of the data, the challenge right now is to use the power of the media and the web in order to explain how to use it. Developing easy but still powerful user Interfaces is the key! With a lot of energy and ideas we are trying to reach more people every day, even with the limited resources that we have.

I am reaching the end with the beginning of this story – the ATLAS Open Data platform. In the outreach group we are learning and developing tools and protocols that help us disseminate the data publicly, trying to prove to ourselves and the members of the experiment that there is interest to use those datasets and resources by the international community.

Our aim is getting more data out there! We want to make that data and tools available for the world to see.

The post Making data and tools available for the world to see: Arturo Sanchez of CERN on why ATLAS uses CC0 data 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.

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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From perfecting a do it yourself spectrometer to mapping and monitoring pollution emissions, Public Lab believes that environmental science can be everyone’s responsibility, and that collaboration should begin at the earliest stages of scientific investigation in order to change the way people see the world around them socially, politically, and environmentally.

Public Lab is free and open for everyone to get involved. Find out more at their website.

Interview with Stevie Lewis (Outreach Manager), Liz Barry (Director of Community Development ), and Mathew Lippincott (Director of Production)

How does Public Lab view open science and citizen science as a pathway to participation in civic community?
Traditional science researcher-subject relationships remove people from the inquiry process. In Public Lab, local environmental questions are asked by people living nearby, and can be explored with tools that are low cost and easy to use. Practicing open source science increases not only the number of people who engage on environmental issues, but creates the space for everyone to explore, generate data, and define the outcomes they seek. Open science and citizen science put people in the center, empowering them with tools and resources to speak substantively about their environmental concerns.

Open licensing is built into all the Public Lab’s projects. In what ways have you seen open source effectively foster collaboration through open processes and licensing?
Open licenses set a basic expectation of sharing. Public Lab’s friendly community norms around sharing are backed with legal structures, so participants know that their authorship will be credited and downstream contributions will continue to grow the commons. When working with community groups, open licensing is the basis for community ownership and provides a sense of security. This transparency increases conversation and discussion, which reinforces the community’s ability to pursue long-term environmental justice outcomes.

Why is “open” important to the Public Lab? How do you use openness to support scientific and educational communities?
Science is fundamentally about replication, and truly independent replication without openness is impossible. Closed licenses and proprietary hardware limit independent evaluation and access to knowledge. Openness has many aspects, however, and we see openness as about more than just licenses. Consider the accessibility of communications and data: Translating content out of difficult expert discourses expands the number of people who can interact with the issues and concepts. Accessible data, such as photographic monitoring, and other visual data, helps people to engage with results. So being open isn’t only about the science itself, but about making the process accessible.

How does openness drive innovation within environmental science and other scientific work?
It is exciting to see science today thinking a lot about openness at the publication stage with a push towards publishing full datasets and articles in the open access movement. However, there is even more work to be done at the pre-press stage. This is not just about “open source between scientists” — but a project to use the principles of open source from problem identification to publication. This helps to break down barriers between science practitioners and the public, to the benefit of both. In many fields there’s little or no open collaboration, especially with the public in other parts of the process. This has contributed to a wide gap between science practice and the public; a gap which keeps key environmental and pollution knowledge from communities which need it.

When openness is the part of the focus, and communities are part of the entire process, we all work in the same space. This means that we can more easily share ideas, learn from each other, and collaboratively generate more knowledge.

What kinds of projects have you worked on that have been particularly inspiring? Have you seen your work remixed or built upon by your community in any surprising ways?
Balloon and Kite mapping, the project that launched Public Lab, continues to inspire. Our original case– making online photo maps of pollution sites (recent example in Picayune, MS)– has expanded to include photography and videography at protests, enhancing public discussions on the qualitative experiences of place and dislocation, and new photography rigs for panoramas and 3D scans.

The spectrometry project has been through many variations, and builds. There are over 70,000 spectra from these and over 8,800 contributors: https://spectralworkbench.org/stats. Where originally this project aimed at exploring questions such as “can I tell if this sample contains petrochemical oils?”, people have built and used spectrometers that look different and explore all kinds of other questions such as food oil fraud and the presence of organophosphate pesticides.

What environmental challenges are you solving for with your community right now? How do you initiate projects?
Examples of some of the challenges people have been working through on Public Lab recently have included things like: How can I measure the size of a landfill in my community, and can I determine when it has reached its capacity? Can I monitor emissions from polluters with any body sensing methods such as visual or odor monitoring, and if so, what types of violations can I catch with these? How do I capture a pollution runoff event from a development or a facility? These challenges come into Public Lab from people who bring them to the website, the online forums, and in-person events.

What’s coming up for the Public Lab?  How can people get involved?
There is a lot of exciting activity in Public Lab right now. We are working to bring structure and strength to the research culture of the community by creating systems for publishing assistance and tool versioning. There are also new ways to interact on Public Lab with the creation of activity grids on tool pages and a new “Question/Answer” feature that’s helping people to interact and share information. We also have a number of live spaces where people can collaborate, from our monthly OpenHour, to the upcoming Annual Barnraising in Louisiana this coming November. Everything from building the questions and the knowledge base on Public Lab, to creating the website itself is an open process that people can get involved in. Join us online or in person!

The post Collaboratively generating more knowledge: Public Lab’s approach to citizen science appeared first on Creative Commons.

The National Cancer Moonshot Initiative seeks to make ten years of progress on cancer research in half that time, with a goal to end cancer in our lifetime. The project—led by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden—recently called for ideas to help shape the cancer research priorities for the Moonshot. They received over 1,600 comments and suggestions.

We offered several actions that would speed up the probability of discovery for new cancer treatments and cures. Our recommendations urged the U.S. government to make immediate open access the default for publicly funded cancer research articles and data.

The Moonshot team noted that several other commenters highlighted the importance of improving access to scientific and medical research about cancer:

Share cancer research results broadly. Require that the entire cancer community provide open, free public access to all research findings, particularly research supported by public funds.

The community comments echoed Vice President Biden’s remarks in April to the American Association for Cancer Research, in which he committed to help break down the access barriers to cancer-related research. “Taxpayers fund $5 billion a year in cancer research every year,” said Biden. “But once it’s published, nearly all of that taxpayer-funded research sits behind walls. Tell me how this is moving the process along more rapidly.”

The implication is clear: if researchers do not have immediate, unrestricted access to the latest publications and data about cancer, they will be slowed in their progress in developing improved treatments and eventual cures.

The Moonshot team is now analyzing the responses to the call for comment, and they plan to release a final report this Fall. We believe that open access to government funded scientific research is absolutely critical to accelerating progress in the fight against cancer. With support from Biden and the Administration, the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative should make openness the default for cancer research.

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Photo: Cancer Immunotherapy by National Institutes of Health, CC BY 2.0

Under the direction of Vice President Joe Biden, the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative seeks to make ten years of progress on cancer research in half that time, with a goal to end cancer in our lifetime.

Today, Creative Commons will participate in Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Summit in Washington, D.C. I will join the Summit, which is aimed at creating action and fostering collaborations around the goals of the Cancer Moonshot. The event will bring together a wide spectrum of stakeholders, including researchers, oncologists, nurses and other care providers, data and technology experts, philanthropists, advocates, patients, and survivors.

Changing Policy to Improve Access to Cancer Research

We need a new approach that will give cancer researchers broad, unencumbered access to scientific literature and data. Even with significant investments in cancer research, the scientific publishing environment hampers innovation and discoveries. In 2016 alone, $5.21 billion of public money was allocated to the National Cancer Institute for cancer related research. Other major agencies such as the National Institutes of Health fund billions more. Despite this massive public investment, research articles remain hidden behind paywalls, delayed from release by long, unnecessary embargo periods. Research data remain unavailable, or are restricted from being machine-readable, an essential element needed to allow deep analysis by new technologies. If all publicly-funded cancer research was required to be shared, and researchers had unfettered access to the underlying data, it would allow everyone to cooperate and lead to new discoveries, analysis, cancer treatments, and ultimately a cure.

Recently, Creative Commons made recommendations on how the federal government can accelerate the speed and probability of discovery 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.

We also asked our community to share their personal stories about the need for open access in cancer research. There stories are powerful and important, and they make a compelling case for immediate open access. Read some of their stories on Medium.

Our Commitments to the Cancer Moonshot Initiative

In response to the Vice President’s call for open access to cancer research publications, Creative Commons is committing 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. These materials will include guides for adopting and implementing open licensing policies, training materials regarding working openly and using licensed materials, and technical tools for applying licenses to shared works.

As with all of Creative Commons’ programs, these materials and tools will be freely available and openly licensed for all who need them, and can also be remixed and repurposed by anyone to serve each community’s needs. Sharing resources ensures that the best materials are available to everyone to increase the effectiveness and impact of the cancer community as a whole.

In addition to providing educational resources and open licensing assistance to researchers, CC 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.

We applaud the bold goals of the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative. Its success will depend both on breaking down barriers of access to research by promoting information sharing and scientific collaboration. One way to do this is to require full, immediate open access to government-funded cancer research, data, and educational resources. Creative Commons is committed to aiding federal agencies in the development and implementation of policies that meet these requirements. We are thrilled to participate in today’s Cancer Moonshot Summit. We look forward to providing leadership, training, and educational materials that will help open up research, enable collaboration, and put an end to cancer.

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A few weeks ago we wrote about how the European Union is pushing ahead its support for open access to EU-funded scientific research and data. Today at the meeting of the Competitiveness Council of the European Union, the Council reinforced the commitment to making all scientific articles and data openly accessible and reusable by 2020. In its communication, the Council offered several conclusions on the transition towards an open science system:

• ACKNOWLEDGES that open science has the potential to increase the quality, impact and benefits of science and to accelerate advancement of knowledge by making it more reliable, more efficient and accurate, better understandable by society and responsive to societal challenges, and has the potential to enable growth and innovation through reuse of scientific results by all stakeholders at all levels of society, and ultimately contribute to growth and competitiveness of Europe;

• INVITES the Commission and the Member States to explore legal possibilities for measures in this respect and promote the use of licensing models, such as Creative Commons, for scientific publications and research data sets;

• WELCOMES open access to scientific publications as the option by default for publishing the results of publicly funded research;

• AGREES to further promote the mainstreaming of open access to scientific publications by continuing to support a transition to immediate open access as the default by 2020;

• ENCOURAGES the Member States, the Commission and stakeholders to set optimal reuse of research data as the point of departure, whilst recognising the needs for different access regimes because of Intellectual Property Rights, personal data protection and confidentiality, security concerns, as well as global economic competitiveness and other legitimate interests.

You can read the rest of the conclusions. Crucially, the Council said that “open access to scientific publications” will be interpreted as being aligned to the definition laid out in the Budapest Open Access Initiative: free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

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April saw lots of activity on the open science front in the European Union. On April 19, the European Commission officially announced its plans to create an “Open Science Cloud”. Accompanying this initiative, the Commission stated it will require that scientific data produced by projects under Horizon 2020 (Europe’s €80 billion science funding program) be made openly available by default. Making open data the default will ensure that the scientific community, companies, and the general public can enjoy broad access (and reuse rights) to data generated by European funded scientific projects. The Commission’s actions in support of open science contrasts with the approach taken by the Member States, who—although none deny the momentum to push for “open by default”—are being much more cautious in developing and publishing open science policies.

Also in April, the Dutch EU Presidency hosted an open science conference in Amsterdam. One outcome of the conference was a collaboratively developed document called the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science. The call for action advocates for “full open access for all scientific publications”, and endorses an environment where “data sharing and stewardship is the default approach for all publicly funded research”.

The 12 action items laid out in the document push to increase support for open science in Europe. We offered suggested improvements to a few of the proposed actions. First, in response to the item to facilitate text and data mining of content, we said that text and data mining (TDM) activities should be considered outside the purview of copyright altogether. In other words, text and data mining should be considered as an extension of the right to read (“the right to read is the right to mine”). However, as others have pointed out, the fact that the InfoSoc and Database directives have not been implemented uniformly across all Member States indicates a need to adopt a pan-European exception in order to provide clarity to those wishing to conduct TDM. We noted that any exception for text and data mining should cover mining for any purpose, not just “for academic purposes.” In addition, a TDM exception should explicitly permit commercial activity. Finally, we said that terms of use, contractual obligations, digital rights management, or other mechanisms that attempt to prohibit the lawful right to conduct TDM should be forbidden.

Second, we questioned why the item to improve insight into IPR and issues such as privacy needs to take into consideration activities that “will ensure that private parties will still be able to profit from their investments.” We noted that all of the proposed actions are supposed to serve the identified pan-European goal of full open access to all scientific publications.

Third, we commended the action to adopt open access principles. However, we suggested that any principles developed should tackle a wider set of issues than those identified: “transparency, competition, sustainability, fair pricing, economic viability and pluralism.” We said that open access principles should take into account the long-standing principles described by the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and its 10-year update, which includes recommendations on public policy changes, licensing, infrastructure support, and advocacy. In addition, we said that the stakeholders involved in the development of any principles should include researchers, students, and the public.

Finally, on the item of how to involve researchers and new users in open science, we urged researchers to actively engage with other scientists, citizens, and non-traditional audiences. Part of this change means that academics and policymakers need to stop characterizing these other groups as “users [who] might get lost in their search for information, or draw wrong conclusions.” If we presume a default of open, we need to get comfortable with sharing—which sometimes means giving up some control—so that others can benefit. With openness in policy and practice, the communication of science can benefit not only its intended audience, but promote novel and interesting types of re-use across disciplines and and by unconventional users.

The post EU pushing ahead in support of open science appeared first on Creative Commons.

Vice President Biden is leading the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, which aims to accelerate cancer research and “make more therapies available to more patients, while also improving our ability to prevent cancer and detect it at an early stage.”

VP Joe Biden asks about CC’s Ryan Merkley’s op-ed in Wired from Matt Lee on Vimeo.

In his remarks to the American Association for Cancer Research, Biden discussed a broad global support for the Cancer Moonshot Initiative. He talked about the importance of collaboration among cancer researchers, academic institutions, patient groups, the private sector, and government.

He made a commitment to cancer researchers to help break down barriers that get in the way of their work. One of the barriers is not having broad open access to cancer research and data. The Vice President asked about the types of innovative insights and discoveries that could be made possible with next generation supercomputers and openly accessible, machine readable text and data.

Biden spoke about realigning the incentives around sharing cancer data so that research and development can lead to better treatments, faster. He said, “taxpayers fund $5 billion a year in cancer research every year, but once it’s published, nearly all of that taxpayer-funded research sits behind walls. Tell me how this is moving the process along more rapidly.” Biden quoted Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley, who this week published an op-ed in WIRED on the urgent imperative for open access to publicly funded cancer research:

 Imagine if instead we said we will no longer conceal cancer’s secrets in a paywall journal — pay-walled journals with restricted databases, and instead make all that we know open to everyone so that the world can join the global campaign to end cancer in our lifetimes? It’s a pretty good question. There may be reasons why it shouldn’t be answered like I think it should — and I’m going to hear from you, I hope, because I’ve not made these recommendations yet. But it seems to me this matters. This question matters.

In the op-ed, Merkley pushed for a fundamental change in the model for sharing and collaboration around scientific information, including cancer research: “An alternative system, where all publicly-funded research is required to be shared under a permissive license, would allow authors to unlock their content and data for re-use with a global audience, and co-operate in new discoveries and analysis.”

We’re grateful to see Vice President Biden’s continued support in the fight against cancer, and we’re committed to assisting in the efforts to ensure unrestricted access to cancer research for the public good.

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Last week Creative Commons hosted the second Institute for Open Leadership. The Institute is a training and peer-to-peer learning opportunity that brings together up-and-coming leaders to develop and implement an open licensing policy in their institution, province or nation. We were thrilled to welcome a diverse group of fellows from 14 countries to Cape Town, South Africa.

• Jane-Frances Agbu – National Open University of Nigeria – Nigeria
• Rim Azib – British Council, Tunis – Tunisia
• Steve Cairns – Greenpeace International – Netherlands
• Amanda Coolidge – BCcampus – Canada
• Daniel DeMarte – Tidewater Community College – United States
• Paula Eskett – CORE Education – New Zealand
• Mostafa Azad Kamal – Bangladesh Open University – Bangladesh
  Roshan Kumar Karn – Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital – Nepal
• Vincent Kizza – Open Learning Exchange Uganda – Uganda
• Fiona MacAllister – University of the Witwatersrand – South Africa
• Katja Mayer – University of Vienna – Austria
• Caroline Mbogo – The World Agroforestry Centre – Kenya
• Niall McNulty – Cambridge University Press – South Africa
• Juliana Monteiro – Museu da Imigração do Estado de São Paulo – Brazil
• Alessandro Sarretta – Institute of Marine Sciences – Italy

In addition to the fellows, we invited seven mentors with open policy expertise from various open sectors. We even brought back two IOL #1 fellows (Klaudia Grabowska and David Ernst) to be mentors at this year’s Institute.

Prior to arriving in Cape Town, all of the fellows proposed an open policy project, which they then developed with their mentors and other fellows during the week. A natural focus for the week was understanding open licensing and the potential for open policies to expand public access to knowledge, data, culture, and research around the world. But licensing is not the only component to a successful open policy adoption. Much of the week involved hearing how openness is perceived within different sectors and institutions, and coming up with strategies and tactics for addressing the important social, cultural, and technological challenges to open policy adoption.

 IOL2 session by Kelsey, CC BY

In addition to learning and working with the mentors and other fellows, there were several interesting speakers that came to talk with the group, including Adam Haupt and Caroline Ncube from the University of Cape Town, Mark Horner from Siyavula, Ralph Borland with Africa Robots, and Barbara Chow, TJ Bliss, and Dana Schmidt from the Hewlett Foundation.  

Over the coming months, the Institute fellows will share regular updates here about their projects, including the progress they are making in implementing open licensing policies within their institutions and governments.

Thank you to Paul Stacey and Kelsey Wiens—who helped facilitate the week-long workshop—and to Kelsey in particular, who helped arrange all the logistics for the meeting in Cape Town. We also appreciate the assistance from the Open Policy Network and the ongoing support from the William and Flora Hewlett and the Open Society Foundations in making the Institute for Open Leadership possible.

IOL2 fellows and mentors by Kelsey, CC BY

The post Reporting back on the Institute for Open Leadership 2 appeared first on Creative Commons.