Science by Steve Rotman is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Access to science is a fundamental human right, and yet, much of that public good is inaccessible because of paywalls and limited in its reuse because of restrictive copyright licenses. The CC licenses are an essential part of open science infrastructure and provide a legal…

Anonymous, “Prudence, Wisdom and Knowledge”, National Library of the Netherlands, Public Domain Mark.  In December last year, the Communia Association for the Public Domain — of which Creative Commons (CC) is a member —  asked the European Commission and European Parliament to consider the development of a Digital Knowledge Act. In this blog post, we…

The complexity of climate change is on display at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP). The conference is arranged into two major zones, blue and green, with the former accessible only by parties  with UNFCCC accreditation. The green zone is a landscape dotted by venues with booths…

This month marks the first anniversary of the Open Climate Campaign — a four-year project working to make the open sharing of research the norm in climate science. We celebrate the success of the campaign in this initial year and look forward to the upcoming year.

In early 2020, something unusual happened in the academic community. A normally guarded community accustomed to holding their data and research papers close, began to adopt much more open practices. Researchers came in droves to preprint servers to post versions of their research papers – that had not yet been peer reviewed – to make…