timothy vollmer - wordpress.com...mentioning to jon and daniel when we talked a few weeks ago, i was...

TIMOTHY VOLLMERPart III

T h e C l i n i c f o r W r i t i n g a n d t h e P u b l i c G o o d

The first step to creating an effective project plan is to set a

baseline. The baseline is the foundation on which the other

project elements will be built on. This must include a scope

statement.

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I know you guys are interested in writing for the public good and understandinghow you could develop an open access policy or share your work under CreativeCommons licenses, and also advocate to others that you’re possiblycollaborating with to do the same or to collaborate under an open licensingpolicy. Creative Commons has some experience in advocating for this. We[Creative Commons] work a lot with various government agencies and also inthe philanthropic sector, so groups I mentioned like the Hewlett Foundation orthe Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that spend a lot of money on creatingdigital materials for the public good because that’s what their charities are allabout these days. Our conversations, I think, have a similar approach, whetherwe’re talking with government agencies or whether we’re talking withphilanthropies. I think some of that could be useful in your sort of context aswell. The thing that we always like to start with, and we’re talking aboutwhether a particular group would like to adopt an open access policy for thewriting that they’re engaging in, is trying to get them aligned on, like, what aretheir goals? What are the goals of a government agency that’s, say, like theNIH, the National Institutes of Health, that spends somewhere north of 30billion dollars of public taxpayer dollars every year on scientific research. Whatare the goals of the National Institutes of Health, or the Center for DiseaseControl? What are all the sorts of big pools of public funding to conductscientific research, you know? What are the goals of the Bill and Melinda GatesFoundation when they have somewhere around 900 million dollars that they’regoing to be spending on scientific research? We like to get them to talk aboutwhat their goals are in terms of, what do you want to see come out of thismoney? What is the purpose of spending this money? When they get talkingabout it they really talk about it in terms of, “we want to see the maximumimpact on our research dollars,” “we want to be supporting pure science,” “wewant to be supporting an increase of knowledge around the world,” “we want tobe supporting faster discoveries of cures for diseases,” those sorts of things. It’sreally important as you’re thinking about possibly developing an open accesspolicy or working with partners to try to come upon goals.

Editor's Note: *references a visual component of the video






statement.

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What do we want to get out of our writing? I think sometimes those thingsaren’t observable and they’re not common knowledge until you start talkingabout it. We ask the question, “Do we actually agree when we’re talking aboutwhat open access means, or what open means?” Sometimes we do agree andsometimes we don’t. There’s this interesting quote from this guy I know, TomLee, who describes Creative Commons, open access, and open licensing in areally good way. He said open access and Creative Commons is “about givingup a little bit of control so that other people can benefit.” I think that’s a reallygood way of synthesizing Creative Commons and our approach to copyright. It’sabout giving up a little bit of control so that other people can use your works, sothat other people can incorporate, can read, can reuse works, for their benefit. Ithink this really overlaps a lot with writing in the public good. We try to get anorganization to think about these questions, to ask these questions. Are youtalking about public access to publicly funded materials? Is your goal broaddissemination or use? Or is your goals something else? Are you trying to run abusiness? Are you trying to do a writing startup? Are you trying to recuperatecosts that you’re putting into it? The answer to those questions affect howyou’re going to develop your policy and what sort of licensing conditions, whatCreative Commons license, you’re going to choose for your project. It’s veryimportant to put these sort of things on the table at the beginning of theprocess because I think it helps smooth out problems down the road. We try toget these organizations and government agencies to state what’s important tothem and why it’s important to them.







statement.

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I’ll just take a brief detour here about some of the foundations we’ve workedwith that have actually implemented open licensing policies within theirfoundation and have actually done this. This [changing tab in browser] is fromthe Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who have adopted a very liberal openlicensing policy for the scientific research that they’re funding. They have theirpolicy up and running now. They actually have statements from their toppeople, you know Trevor Mundel used to be the head of their Global HealthInitiative, writing publicly about why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation isdoing this and writing it in public so that everyone understands the motivationsbehind our organization doing this. It’s clear to the public, it’s clear to theresearchers that are going to be applying for money, and it’s also clear to thepeople working inside the foundation to hear from the top executives why thisis an important thing that our foundation is going to be doing. The HewlettFoundation has done the same thing: explained that adopting an open licensingpolicy is going to help our good ideas go further. They’ve developed this blogpost and written about it. If you look at other places like the WikimediaFoundation, the group that runs Wikipedia, they also do a lot of scientificresearch around their platform. Everything that they produce is licensed undera Creative Commons license as well and they have explanations of why they’redoing it. All of this is just to say it’s important to be very clear about this withthe public and internally with other people that are working on the projectswith you. The goals is the first thing, and sort of making those clear.







statement.

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Another thing that we talk about when we talk with governments, foundations,and others looking to adopt an open licensing policy is, what sorts of contentare you talking about? Are you going to be funding scientific research? Is itgoing to be mostly sociological reports? Is it going to be educational contentlike instructional videos or textbooks? Is it going to be photography? All thesethings you need to be thinking about because the different types of contentmight require different solutions with regard to the process that’s involved andalso the license that you choose. For example, if you’re talking about creatingopen educational resources, the normative way to approach that is to useCreative Commons licenses of course, but use licenses that don’t have theclause that says that you can’t change it because obviously you want teachersto be able to modify, adapt, update, and customize digital educational materialsso that they’re relevant for local communities. They use all the CC licensesexcept for the ones that don’t permit the creation of derivatives. For openaccess research they’ve rallied around this very liberal license solution which isthe Creative Commons Attribution license, which means anyone can use it forany purpose, even commercially, as long as you give attribution to the author.For other types of content you need to think differently; talk about things likecreating and sharing data and data sets. We really advocate for people to utilizeeven our public domain tools. CC0 is something that allows researchers to putdata directly into the public domain, which means there is no rights reserved.Anyone can use it for whatever purpose and it lowers the barriers to sharingand reuse maximally. We think this is really useful for data because it can beuseful then to the widest number of people in the widest number of ways. Ofcourse, you might think about other things that don’t require CC licensing, orprobably don’t. If your open access project is going to be creating software, werecommend that you don’t use CC licenses because there are already a lot ofdifferent open access licenses— sorry— open software licenses— out thereproduced by groups like the Free Software Foundation. So when we’re talkingabout creating an open licensing policy, we need to talk about what types ofcontent are you producing.







statement.

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The final component is really getting buy in from the various stakeholders thatare going to be affected by the policy. You really need to and we reallyadvocate this when we talk with governments and when we talk withfoundations. They need to be developing their policy with the people that aregoing to be affected by it. It’s always nice to be able to do it that way ratherthan you hear on Monday morning we’ve got this new thing we need to follownow. People don’t appreciate that. They want to be looped into the process.They want to provide input in the process and be heard. There’s a push forcooperation around actual development of the policy and implementation of thepolicy; in my experience we’ve seen that leadership is really important. I washmentioning to Jon and Daniel when we talked a few weeks ago, I was involvedin a project at University of Michigan to share all of our course content at themedical school. It was great because we had advocates from the top of themedical school saying, “this is important, we want to do it.” That’s not enough;you need buy in from the individual faculty that are going to be affected by thispolicy. That requires legwork, going around to people, talking with them,understanding what their concerns are, and getting them on board. It needs tobe a collaborative process and a cooperative process. Leadership from the top isimportant, but it’s not everything. You need support from below, you need thatgrassroots as well.







statement.

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Something we actually talk about with governments and foundations as well isit doesn’t need to be revolutionary overnight. You can start small, experimentwith a particular part of your portfolio. Maybe there is a small pool of moneyaround a particular scientific discipline where it’s really right for an openlicensing policy or the researchers involved there are really open to sharing.Why not try an open licensing policy there first before you try to extend it toother areas that might have more pushback? Test it and refine it, start small,and experiment in that way. The Hewlett Foundation did this. They started onlywith their education program and eventually moved their open licensing policyso it covers all of the foundation. In terms of buy in, some examples from theuniversity side that we’ve recognized is there’s open access policy that’sdeveloped by people within the university and executives within the university,but then it actually requires a vote from the faculty about whether they’regoing to adopt this or not. These measures are incredibly important. Of course itchanges from university to university, but getting that buy in is reallyimportant. To have a faculty senate vote on whether we’re going to adopt anopen licensing policy is really important when you’re talking about instituting itat places like Harvard and the University of California.







statement.

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A few final things, of course it’s useful to have a few safety valves here or there.We advocate for organizations who adopt the default open licensing policy, anopen licensing policy that will cover everything. Of course sometimes it can’tcover everything; there might be specific things that need to be carved out. Forexample, I remember one grantee program that was funded from the OpenSociety Foundations funded a documentary film program. This documentaryfilm program pulled in different pieces of film from popular media andtelevision, which couldn’t be licensed under a Creative Commons license. Itwould have just been too difficult to get the permissions to do that. Thatparticular documentary film was carved out of the policy even though itcovered the rest of the grantee. It’s important to have a little bit of a flexibilityand some of those safety valves because we obviously realize there’s going tobe exceptions to every licensing rule. Another thing that is important for thegrantees to develop, “how are we going to measure whether this policy isimpactful or not? How are we going to measure whether people are following itor are complying with it?” That’s actually very important. Finally like Imentioned before it’s important to reinforce to the public, to your staff, and tothe stakeholders why this is important. Why are we doing this? Actually bringthat up from time to time and reexamine some of your notions from time totime to realize whether we’re still on the same page or whether the policy needsto be change or adapted a bit.


timothy vollmer - wordpress.com...mentioning to jon and daniel when we talked a few weeks ago, i was...

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