Report Released by U.S. GAO Demonstrates the Need for Open Textbooks

Books /John Liu / CC BY A report issued by the United States Government Accountability Office on June 6th confirms a trend of the educational publishing industry: textbook costs to students at higher education institutions are rising 6% per year on average, and have risen 82% over the last decade. The study, ordered by Congress, [...]

Posted by on 14 June 2013 | 11:00 am

CC Launches Affiliate Project Grants

Judy van der Velden / CC BY-NC-ND CC is excited to announce the launch of our Affiliate Project Grants. These project grants will be used to support and expand the work of CC’s Global community of volunteers. The goal of the grant program, which is enabled by sponsorship from Google, is to increase the capacity [...]

Posted by on 13 June 2013 | 7:36 pm

University proposal supports U.S. public access directive

Last week the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) released a draft plan on how they’d support public access to federally funded research aligned with the February 22 White House public access directive. The SHared Access Research Ecosystem, or SHARE, is a [...]

Posted by on 12 June 2013 | 12:00 pm

Lumen Learning launches open course frameworks for teaching

Ryan / CC BY-SA Lumen Learning, a company founded to help institutions adopt open educational resources (OER) more effectively, just launched its first set of course frameworks for educators to use as-is or to adapt to their own needs. The six course frameworks cover general education topics spanning English composition, reading, writing, algebra, and college [...]

Posted by on 11 June 2013 | 2:00 pm

State of the Map is alive and well

About 400 map makers, coders, cartographers, designers, business services providers and data mungers of chiefly spatial persuasion gathered in San Francisco to “talk OpenStreetMap, learn from each other, and move the project forward.” These conference attendees are a tip of an iceberg composed of 1.1 million registered users who have collectively gathered 3.2 billion GPS [...]

Posted by on 11 June 2013 | 1:38 pm

Doubling down on Markdown for science

Scientific authoring workflow is a beast. You keep notes on paper (hopefully, a notebook, and not just loose pages), in word-processing documents unhelpfully named “notes” followed by “notes1,” “notes2″ or worse, “notes_old,” “notes_old1.” You manage your bibliography on your desktop or on the web, you have a directory folder full of images, charts, photos and [...]

Posted by on 10 June 2013 | 7:04 pm

CC Board Meeting: New Directions and Opportunities

On Saturday, April 27, the Creative Commons Board of Directors met at the Safra Center at Harvard. We discussed the accomplishments of the past 12 months, both in the organization and in the broader open movement, and the new opportunities on the horizon, including creating an Advisory Council to complement the Board itself. The State [...]

Posted by on 10 June 2013 | 11:30 am

New Regional Coordinators for CC in Europe

John Weitzmann / DTKindler / CC BY Gwen Franck / Gwen Franck / All Rights Reserved I am very happy to introduce our two new European Regional Coordinators – John Weitzmann and Gwen Franck. Creative Commons has volunteer teams in over 70 countries, including 35 in Europe, all of whom work to support and promote [...]

Posted by on 9 June 2013 | 11:13 pm

Guest Blog Post: Crowdfunding the Commons

This guest blog post was written by Nic Suzor. What do Amanda Palmer, a book on storytelling in Africa, and particle physics have in common? That’s what I’d like to find out. My name is Nic Suzor, and I am a researcher at QUT School of Law and the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation [...]

Posted by on 6 June 2013 | 6:19 pm

New Annual Report and Strategy Document

Creative Commons has grown tremendously since we started. As we approached the milestone of our 10th birthday, and with a new CEO on board, we began an intensive review of our progress and priorities. Sometimes you need to use big milestones to stop and see where you are, and occasionally you find that decisions made [...]

Posted by on 4 June 2013 | 11:17 am

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