Science

The more we understand about science and its complexities, the more important it is for scientific data to be shared openly. It’s not useful to have ten different labs doing the same research and not sharing their results; likewise, we’re much more likely to be able to pinpoint diseases if we have genomic data from a large pool of individuals. Since 2004, we’ve been focusing our efforts to expand the use of Creative Commons licenses to scientific and technical research.

Open Access

The Scholars’ Copyright Project

Creative Commons plays an instrumental role in the Open Access movement, which is making scholarly research and journals more widely available on the Web. The world’s largest Open Access publishers in the world all use CC licenses to publish their content online. Today, 10% of the world’s entire output of scholarly journals is CC licensed.

We’re also expanding Open Access to research institutions. Creative Commons licenses are directly integrated into institutional repository software platforms like DSpace and ePrints. University libraries at MIT, Johns Hopkins, and Carnegie Mellon offer access to our Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine, which helps faculty members upload their research for public use while retaining the rights they want to keep.

We’ve created policy briefings and guidelines to help institutions implement Open Access into their frameworks.

Open Data

At Creative Commons, we believe scientific data should be freely available to everyone. We call this idea Open Data. Creative Commons legal tools can be used to make data and databases freely available. We’ve already had successful implementations in taxonomic, energy, genomics, disease research, geospatial, polar, and bilbiometric disciplines, and are providing guidance to funders, institutions, private foundations, governments, the corporate sector, and other stakeholders.

R&D

The commons doesn’t begin and end with copyrighted works. We think open research materials are vital to innovation, not just data and documents; to that end, we’ve developed and deployed CC-inspired legal tools for transferring biological materials. For example, the Personal Genome Project licensed 1,000 lines of stem cells under CC’s Materials Transfer AgreementCHDI’s repository of Huntingtons Disease research tools. And we have built a public patent licensing conversation through our involvement in the GreenXchange project.

We have also invested years in researching the realities of re-using open data at web scale through our Neurocommons project, which serves integrated life sciences databases and open-source software essential for re-using data.

Learn more

Visit our science portal on the Creative Commons wiki for more resources about CC and science, and to share your knowledge about open science. Follow what’s new in the world of CC in science via the science section of the CC blog.