It’s Open Access Week, a yearly global event to raise broad awareness about the opportunities and benefits for open access to scientific and scholarly research. Open Access Week—now in its 10th year—mobilises action for progressive policy changes so that researchers and the public get immediate online access to the results of scholarly research and the…

Hace tres semanas reportamos que Diego Gómez, estudiante Colombiano demandado por compartir por internet un paper académico, ha sido absuelto de los cargos penales en su contra. Pero hace algunos días los abogados del denunciante apelaron a la decisión del juez de primera instancia, lo que implica que luego de varios años de procedimientos judiciales…

Support Diego by donating today! Three weeks ago we reported that Diego Gómez, the former Colombian student who’s been prosecuted for sharing a research paper online, had been acquitted of criminal charges. But within days of the ruling, the author’s lawyer appealed the decision, meaning that even after several years of unnecessary (and expensive) criminal…

The U.S. Department of Education’s new open licensing rule has gone into effect.

The new book Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science, edited by Rajiv Jhangiani and Robert Biswas-Diener features the work of open advocates around the world, including Cable Green, Director of Open Education at Creative Commons.

Diego Gómez, the Colombian student who for the last three years has been prosecuted for sharing an academic paper online, has been cleared of criminal charges. The decision was delivered today by a judge in the Bogotá Circuit Criminal Court. In 2014 Diego was a student in conservation and wildlife management, with poor access to…

Together with re:3d, an Austin-based 3D printing company, and the #NEWPALMYRA project, a community platform dedicated to the virtual remodeling and creative use of architecture from the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, Creative Commons has produced a 200 pound, 7.5 feet tall 3D rendering of one of the Palmyra Tetrapylons.

This week a coalition of scholarly publishers, researchers, and nonprofit organizations launched the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a project to promote the unrestricted open access to scholarly citation data. From the website: Citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They are primary data that provide both provenance and an…

Glasstree is a new platform built on “healing academic publishing” to provide a range of Open Access options that allow academics to quickly and inexpensively self-publish their monographs, returning 70% of the royalties to the author. The company was launched in November by a number of publishing veterans with the goal of directly addressing the…

Satellites to understand our changing Earth. Image: ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Yesterday, the European Space Agency announced an Open Access policy for images and data under a Creative Commons BY-SA license. ESA has made various moves toward making data and images more open in the past, but this announcement is a major milestone for the organization’s commitment to openness. Previously, ESA released individual images under Creative…