Ford Foundation Joins Hewlett Foundation And Gates Foundation In Requiring Research They Fund To Be Released Under CC BY Licenses | Techdirt

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-02-05

Summary:

"Over the last few months, a bunch of big foundations have officially stated that all research that they fund via their grants now has to be placed under an open Creative Commons license such as the CC BY license that says that the information can be freely shared and copied, even for commercial purposes, with the only restriction being that you have to attribute the content to the original authors. In September of last year, the Hewlett Foundation kicked it off when it announced that it was requiring CC BY licensing on all content that it funded, followed in November by the Gates Foundation making a similar announcement. And, this week, the Ford Foundation has done the same ... This is absolutely awesome, and hopefully more Foundations will follow suit. It would be nice if these foundations also offered up the opportunity to use a CC0 public domain dedication as an alternative (which goes even further than the CC BY license), but that seems like nitpicking for the most part.  Frankly this is great for a few different reasons. First, we've discussed the importance of open access and information sharing as it relates to research -- and it's still depressing how much important research gets locked up behind paywalls and stringent copyright enforcement. Second, increasing the amount of work, in general, that is freely shareable can only lead to that work being much more useful to -- and used by -- others who are looking to build on that work and do great things with it. Third, just in getting more people to realize that -- contrary to what some maximalists like to pitch in their propaganda -- not everything needs to be locked up to be valuable.  Kudos to these foundations for taking a stand ..."

Link:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150203/15030029898/ford-foundation-joins-hewlett-foundation-gates-foundation-requiring-research-they-fund-to-be-released-under-cc-licenses.shtml

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lkfitz's bookmarks

Tags:

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

Date tagged:

02/05/2015, 10:56

Date published:

02/05/2015, 06:18