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CC News: Potential Impact of the World Bank's Open Access Policy

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Report from "What the World Bank's Open Access Policy Means for Development" panel

The World Bank hosted an event called What the World Bank’s Open Access Policy Means for Development. Participants included Peter Suber from Harvard University, Michael Carroll from American University (Mike is on the Board of Directors at Creative Commons), and Cyril Muller and Adam Wagstaff from the World Bank. The discussion was timely given the Bank’s recently-announced Open Access Policy and Open Knowledge Repository. The World Bank’s Open Access Policy requires that all research outputs and knowledge products published by the Bank be licensed Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) as a default. The conversation revolved around the impact and potential for World Bank research — and open access in general — for development in countries around the world. For example, how will access and reuse of research under an open access policy create opportunities to solve large global challenges such as climate change and hunger? Read more.

Mike Linksvayer
Mike Linksvayer by Joi
CC BY

A big thanks to Mike Linksvayer

Many of you know Mike Linksvayer, the first CTO and then Vice President of Creative Commons. Mike started at Creative Commons back in 2003 (almost a decade ago!), and since then has shepherded CC through a period of great expansion, providing leadership and support for efforts across various initiatives and around the world. He has also been a great help to all of us this past year, during the transition from part-time to full-time CEO. We can not begin to name everything that Mike has done, not only for Creative Commons, but for free and open culture generally, so we’ll just name a few, with the caveat that, if ever there was a jack of all trades, he is Mike Linksvayer. Since 2003, Mike has helped to… Read more.

Liberated Pixel Cup art contest launches

We now welcome artists to begin working on artwork for the art competition of the Liberated Pixel Cup! Zombies, potions, spaceships, werewolves, whatever! We're looking forward to seeing what contributions you can build to match the style guide. On that note, one of the primary goals of Liberated Pixel Cup was to create a clear style that many people could collaborate on. We're happy to announce that that style guide is released, along with some base assets to build off of and a fun "walkaround" demo that shows how the tiles can fit together. Read more.

In other news:

  • CC Costa Rica represented us at WIPO for the 9th session of the Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP) and made a statement on the public domain. Read it here.
  • COMMUNIA also explores the role of the digital public domain in its final report. For four years, COMMUNIA gathered over 50 members from academia and the CC community to research, promote, and preserve the digital public domain.
  • More than 25,000 people signed the U.S. petition to support public access to publicly funded scientific research.
  • The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and UNESCO have published a report documenting government open educational resources (OER) policies.
  • CC Sweden designed a fantastic poster explaining Creative Commons and wants you to help translate it to other languages.
  • The Walters Museum recently uploaded 19,000 images to Wikimedia under CC BY-SA and in the public domain.
  • In education, the Saylor Foundation has expanded its $20,000 open textbook challenge to include the creation of new texts under CC BY. Interested academics may submit a brief statement about their proposed text.
  • Lastly, we hosted a successful conference for grantees of the $500 million U.S. Department of Labor's Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program (TAACCCT) program. Grantees learned how to implement the CC BY license requirement of the grant for their educational materials.

World Bank logos in banner are governed by other terms and not subject to the CC BY license.

 

Posted 06 June 2012

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