This is a presentation given at the Stanford Medical School Lane Library for Open Access Week 2014.

1. The HOW and WHY for
openness in scholarly
publishing and
teaching materials
Timothy Vollmer | Stanford School of Medicine Lane Library | October 22, 2014

2. What should we talk about?
• What’s Creative Commons and why is it useful?
• What are CC licenses and how do they work?
• Who uses CC?
• CC and open access publishing
• CC and open educational resources
• Connection between OA and OER
• Q&A

4. Nonprofit organization
Free copyright licenses
Founded in 2001
Operate worldwide

5. Creative Commons develops,
supports, and stewards legal
and technical infrastructure that
maximizes digital creativity,
sharing, and innovation.

6. The problem:
traditional copyright
does not work well for
sharing and free online
collaboration.

7. Features of copyright today
• Supposed to “promote the Progress of Science and useful
Arts”
• Automatic
• in U.S., lasts for life of author + 70 years
• “bundle of rights” = reproduce, make derivative works,
distribute, public performance
• Have to ask permission
• Infringement is expensive ($750-$150k)
• Safety valves (fair use)
• Public domain = no copyright protection
• Facts not protected

8. FAST
FWD

9. With the web,
It’s so damn easy to share

10. But how to ask
permission?

11. How to support those that
just want to share?

12. CC’s solution:
A standardized, legally
robust way to grant
copyright permissions to
creative works.

13. “Lowers transaction costs”

14. CC’s legal infrastructure:
(1) Copyright Licenses
(2) Public Domain Tools

15. (1) CC Copyright Licenses

16. CC licenses build on
traditional copyright
• “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved”
• Gives creators a choice about which freedoms to
grant and which rights to keep
• minimizes transaction costs by granting the
public certain permissions beforehand

17. License Building Blocks
All CC licenses are
combinations of 4
elements:
Attribution
ShareAlike
NonCommercial
NoDerivatives

18. Creative Commons License Chooser:
http://creativecommons.org/choose/

20. Public Domain Dedication
Licenses

21. Anatomy of a CC License:

26. (2) Public Domain Tools

27. CC0 Public Domain Dedication
(read “CC Zero”)
Universal waiver, permanently surrenders
copyright and related rights, placing the work
as nearly as possible into the public domain
worldwide

28. CC Public Domain Mark
Not legally operative, but a label to be used by
those with knowledge of a work already in the
public domain
Only intended for use with works in the
worldwide public domain

29. 75 jurisdictions

30. 500M – 1B works

31. Who uses
Creative Commons?

32. Wikipedia: Over 77,000 contributors
working on over 22 million articles in 285
languages; 23 million files on Commons

37. FOCUS:
OPEN ACCESS

39. By "open access" to this literature, we mean its 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 other than those inseparable from gaining access to the
internet itself.
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.
- Budapest Open Access Initiative,
February 2002

40. TWO PATHS
GREEN = Repositories
GOLD = Open Access
Journals

41. EXAMPLES
GREEN = NIH Public
Access Policy
GOLD = Public Library of
Science

43. Why publish Open Access?
• Aligned with goals of research and
advancement of science and scholarship
• OA citation advantage; academic authors write
to be read
• “Unexpected readers”; Ability for work to be
used in other contexts; if openly licensed
allows for translations, use as open educational
resources such as Wikipedia
• Funding mandates require openness/sharing
• Retain rights to your work

49. FOCUS:
OPEN
EDUCATIONAL
RESOURCES

50. OER are teaching, learning, and research
resources that reside in the public domain or
have been released under an intellectual property
license that permits their free use and re-purposing
by others. Open educational resources
include full courses, course materials, modules,
textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and
any other tools, materials, or techniques used to
support access to knowledge.
- William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

51. 4Rs

52. Reuse
Redistribute
Revise
Remix

55. Open Educational Resources

56. Why publish OERs?
• Cost saving for students; rough estimate is that
CC-licensed open textbooks saved $100M
• Overcome barriers: language (translations
possible), discovery (Google index of CC-licensed
content), technical (move content to
other formats), cultural (re-use of materials in
other teaching contexts and in other parts of
world)
• Increased exposure to teaching/research;
coordination with other faculty

57. Search

60. Where to find (and share)
freely re-usable images?
• Flickr
• Wikimedia Commons
• Internet Archive
• Digital Public Library of America
• Europeana

67. Marking

68. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking

69. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking

70. • Attribution:
• Who’s the rightsholder?
• Where does it live online?
• What is the license used?
• Intended to be flexible
• With 4.0, “in any reasonable manner based
on the medium, means, context”
• For example, put it on a webpage and
provide a link to that page with the image

71. OA OER

78. Questions?

79. Thank you very much!
tvol@creativecommons.org