Commitment to Open Licensing | Hewlett Foundation

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-09-20

Summary:

"As part of our commitment to openness and transparency, the Hewlett Foundation has long supported open licensing—a replacement for traditional copyright that encourages sharing intellectual property. Open licenses, such as those developed by our longtime grantee Creative Commons, protect authors’ rights while explicitly permitting others to freely use, distribute, and build upon their work. The benefits are substantial: open licensing increases the chances that good ideas get a hearing, that others develop them further, and, ultimately, that they have their greatest impact. The Hewlett Foundation makes information related to our grantmaking available under an open license so that others may learn from our experience. Beginning in 2014, we are extending this commitment to open licensing to include, in appropriate circumstances, materials created with our grant dollars. More specifically, the Hewlett Foundation now requires that grantees receiving project-based grants—those made for a specific purpose—openly license the final materials created with those grants (reports, videos, white papers, and the like) under the most recent Creative Commons Attribution license. We also will require that the materials be made easily accessible to the public, such as by posting them to a grantee’s website. These requirements will not apply to grants made for general operating support of an organization or a program or center within an organization because they are incompatible with the nature of general support. We very much hope however, that the positive experience of openly licensing materials created with project-based grants will encourage grantees to do so for all their work. The Attribution license is the most open license offered by Creative Commons. It gives others permission, free of charge and in advance, to acquire and make licensed work available, and even to incorporate it into new work—to “remix, transform and build upon” the work, in Creative Commons’ phrase. This includes a right to sell the licensed work, so long as the original author is credited for his or her contribution. We will not enforce this new requirement thoughtlessly. If our default open license does not make sense for a particular project—such as if the work contains sensitive information or if revenue generated by its sale is critical to an organization’s financial well-being—we will work with the grantee to determine the most appropriate license. Our commitment to open licensing is meant to help, not harm, grantees, and we will administer it accordingly ..."

Link:

http://www.hewlett.org/about-us/values-policies/commitment-open-licensing

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.copyright oa.licensing oa.cc oa.funders oa.mandates oa.hewlett_foundation oa.libre oa.policies

Date tagged:

09/20/2014, 20:13

Date published:

09/20/2014, 16:13