Serendipity35

Two other areas within the Creative Commons that you might not know about are ccLearn and the Science Commons.

ccLearn is dedicated to supporting open learning and open educational resources (OER). Their mission is to minimize barriers (legal, technical, social) to sharing and reuse of educational materials.

In speaking of legal barriers, they advocate for the licensing of educational materials under interoperable terms, such as those provided by Creative Commons licenses. Part of those efforts will also include educating teachers, learners, and policy makers about copyright and fair-use issues pertaining to education.

In trying to lower technical barriers, they promote interoperability standards and tools to facilitate remixing and reuse. They also encourage teachers and learners to re-use educational materials available on the Web, and to build on each other’s contributions in order to eliminate social barriers.

ccLearn launched this summer and is an international project working with open educational sites and resources from around the world.

Science Commons, another offshoot of Creative Commons, introduced this summer a set of tools to allow authors greater control over papers published in scientific journals.

Their Neurocommons project expanded with the launch of an open-source research platform for brain studies that uses text-mining tools and analysis software to annotate millions of neurology papers. This allows researchers to find relevant information in the field quickly.

Read more about their efforts in this interview with the executive director, John Wilbanks published in Popular Science.