Thousands of strangers working together, almost entirely online, to effectively solve an urgent, global challenge is remarkable—and it’s happening, right now. Recently, we published a post titled, “Open-Source Medical Hardware: What You Should Know and What You Can Do” examining the collaborative efforts by volunteer groups, universities, and research centers to solve the medical supply shortage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic through open-source medical hardware. While researching that story, we stumbled on the work of Just One Giant Lab (JOGL). 

JOGL is a research and innovation laboratory based in Paris, France that operates as an open and distributed mobilization platform for collaborative task solving. When the pandemic started, JOGL’s team recognized that their knowledge of community organizing and their open platform could help create and support many open-source projects. In response, they launched the OpenCovid19 Initiative, which now includes over 4000 healthcare workers, engineers, designers, scientists, technologists, and everyday citizens. The vibrant, global community exchanges thousands of daily messages on hundreds of projects they hope will help save lives; from an open-source syringe to an algorithm that calculates the probability of infection. 

To get a better understanding of JOGL’s mission, its community, and open source work, we reached out to Co-Founder and CTO Leo Blondel via email.

Our interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Q: What’s Just One Giant Lab’s (JOGL) mission? 

Blondel: Our mission from the beginning has been to become the first full-fledged virtual laboratory where users can collaborate and innovate in order to solve problems and answer research questions—we want to be a central hub for open science and innovation. On the social side, we aim to help humanity fix its most urgent and important problems using open science, responsible innovation, and continuous learning. To that end, we partner with academic labs, companies, startups, foundations, NGOs, and public services to create participatory research programs for understanding and solving health, environmental, social, and humanitarian issues. On the technical side, we create and utilize a series of open-source applications to support the research and innovation activities generated by our users. To this aim, we have created a platform where users can launch their projects and collaborate openly with others to solve pressing needs.

Q: What are some initiatives JOGL is working on in regards to the medical supply shortage? 

Blondel: Currently, multiple initiatives are being developed. We quickly identified that many factories, maker spaces, and citizens had a production capacity that could be put to use. Due to the beauty of open-source projects, the number of available prototypes was staggering—over 70 designs for open masks, for example. Therefore a project was created to review, test, and select the designs that were the most relevant, safe, compliant, and easily manufactured by a panel of medical experts. Armed with this idea, we created a partnership with the Paris Hospital Network (APHP) to organize a validation challenge and identified four essential needs: face masks and face shields, syringe pumps, consumables for intubation, and ventilators. So far, the Open-Source Syringe Pump project has been selected, and a team composed of medical doctors, engineers, and manufacturers are working to get the device refined with a foolproof user experience (UX) design and fail proof delivery system. Finally, a long-running open-source respirator project is currently in the testing phase to prove that the design is applicable in a medical setting.  

Q: How is JOGL working across its entire community to help fill the medical supply shortage? 

Blondel: JOGL acts as the central hub that connects citizens, amateurs, medical doctors, researchers, and policymakers. By creating a central repository of knowledge where people can not only document, but also discuss, and collaborate on open research and innovation we accelerate what would normally require established professional networks. An example is the aforementioned Open-Source Syringe Pump project, where JOGL connected the knowhow of the medical doctors at the Paris Hospital Network to engineers in the United States and manufacturers in China. JOGL not only provides the technical tools necessary for this to happen, but also the coordination team necessary to establish relationships between humans and ideas. 

We are also creating and implementing a new open governance scheme so that communities can self organize more easily. For this, we are working with wonderful community members who specialize in management, sociocracy, holacracy, and other new and exciting forms of open governance. We hope that this beta test will help us establish new and clear guidelines and models to create better UX and user flows in order to fast track similar collaborations in the future.

Q: Have you been surprised at the willingness of your community to volunteer their time and resources to help with these initiatives? 

Blondel: I was not surprised. From a historical perspective, times of crisis have more often than not created enormous solidarity movements. Most recently, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico saw the regeneration of community links long lost. People flying back to help and thousands of people rebuilding infrastructure for free—a great read on this would be Naomi Klein’s The Battle For Paradise. As an evolutionary biologist, I think that because we have evolved to be a social species and have empathy, it’s hard for us to stand inactive when we see misery. So I wasn’t surprised that people organized to help. Open communities are the foundational structure of JOGL, and we have always believed in their power to change the world. What did surprise us was the willingness of large institutions to trust initiatives like ours in a time of crisis and to try to establish partnerships with us to strengthen the community effort. We are now seeing a shift in how large actors are seeing open initiatives and I believe it’s for the best! 

Q: What impact do you think the COVID-19 pandemic will have on open source and open science?

Blondel: I think that this pandemic happened at a time where open communities were “ripe.” What I mean by that is for a long time the open world was not very inclusive to the general public. However, thanks to, in part, the citizen science movement, there is general public enthusiasm for open research and innovation. It’s hard to predict the future, but I hope that big institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO) will start funding open science initiatives. 

However, the open science movement still needs to prove itself to the world. By nature, computer code lends itself to being openly accessible more easily; you really only need a computer to work on open-source coding projects. Science, on the other hand, is much harder because there is a lack of access, particularly in regards to physical access to laboratories and resources. The validation process can also serve as a barrier. Therefore, figuring out how to break down these barriers to scientific resources and increase the production of scientific work that is open access is something we are incentivized to work on right now—and something we will continue to work on for many years to come.

If you have a question regarding CC Licenses and how they apply to open-source hardware designs or other projects, please feel free to contact us at info@creativecommons.org.

Stop the spread of COVID-19 by taking these steps outlined by the WHO, including washing your hands for at least 20 seconds and social distancing.

The post Just One Giant Lab Co-Founder Leo Blondel on the Power of Community and Open Source During COVID-19 appeared first on Creative Commons.

Since the founding of Creative Commons (CC) in 2001, we’ve been supported by like-minded organizations and individuals who value open access, the open community, and the global commons as much as we do. As we near our 20th anniversary, we are reflecting on the past and planning for the future. What better way to do that than to hear from the supporters who have made our work possible over the last 20 years?

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been a longtime CC supporter and thought partner. We reached out to the Foundation’s President, Larry Kramer, for his thoughts on the value of open access in the Foundation’s philanthropic work and the future he envisions for the open movement. 

Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

CC: The Hewlett Foundation has been a funder and partner of CC for over a decade. Can you talk about the value the Foundation has found in CC’s work, and why open access is so important?

Larry Kramer: Openness is one of our core guiding principles. We believe that sharing our knowledge and experiences—our challenges as well as our successes—with others can both build trust and invite their ideas for how we can improve. We are committed to continuous learning, and we see open access as a key part of that goal. 

When Creative Commons was founded, the notion that content creators would routinely allow others to use or modify their work seemed far-fetched. Today, Creative Commons stewards a large and growing movement to make knowledge more freely available, to foster collaboration, and to spur advances and improvements that make the world a better place for everyone. At the most basic level, the sharing that Creative Commons facilitates increases the chances that good ideas will be heard and have an impact. We care a lot about that, which is why Creative Commons has been such a longstanding partner. 

CC: In 2014, the Hewlett Foundation extended its open licensing policy to all grantees, writing: “Solving the kinds of challenges the Hewlett Foundation chooses to address requires good ideas, but ideas are not enough. Asking grantees to make sure their ideas are shared, so others can learn from and build on them, will help those ideas go further, be challenged and strengthened, and, in the end, do more good.” 

Can you take us through the process behind this decision?

Larry Kramer: The Hewlett Foundation has long had a policy of making information related to our grantmaking available under an open license so that others can learn from our experience. We share evaluations that our organization commissions, as well as our strategy papers and non-confidential information about individual grants. In 2014, we extended our commitment to open licensing to include, under most circumstances, materials created with our grant dollars. The basic decision was not difficult: we believe in openness and the benefits it produces, and it seemed straightforward to apply that principle to things produced with our funding as well as to things we produce ourselves. But we also knew that a blanket rule would not work, because we support diverse areas of work, produced in many different contexts, by organizations with different operational models. For example, a policy like this would affect researchers at a think tank quite differently from artists in a performing arts organization. So we thought this through carefully and only acted after conversations internally and with grantees, crafting a policy to ensure that it did not inadvertently hurt or burden grantees. At the end of the consultation process, we emerged with a new language for project grants and a toolkit for grantees to understand how to implement these requirements. 

Happily, the shift has worked out very well. In fields with very scant resources, understanding how to actually go about openly licensing something can be confusing. We have tried to build an understanding amongst our grantees and peer funding partners of what open licensing is, and how it can contribute to their goals. Where necessary, we sometimes provide legal counsel to grantees who are trying to figure out the best way to do this. 

CC: Advocates of open access believe that it can lead to a more accessible, equitable, and innovative world. Can you share any examples of how the Foundation has seen this idea at work? 

Larry Kramer: One concrete example is our Images of Empowerment collection of 2,000 openly licensed images of women in 11 countries around the world. It’s well established that visuals can both create and change our biases and inspire action. Several years ago, one of our program officers in our Global Development and Population portfolio wanted to change how we “see” women in developing countries. Working with Getty Images, we funded a new set of stock photos that show women making decisions, earning income, and accessing reproductive health care and services to care for themselves and their families. Our purpose was twofold: provide a more accurate, positive representation of women’s lives and make the images a public good, free for any nonprofit to use. We knew that open licensing would be a necessary component to help encourage use and reuse. Nonprofits seldom have affordable or easy access to images that tell their stories or show their impact. The photographs were intended to fill that gap for both advocates doing this work and newsrooms that cover these issues. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation have since added to the collection, and the full set now includes 2,000 high-quality, editorial images of women working and acting in their communities in Colombia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Peru, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Thailand, Uganda, and the United States. 

Another example is our long-term investment in free, remixable, revisable learning materials, termed as open educational resources (OER). Like CC, Hewlett has been investing in OER since its inception in 2001. We believe that access to knowledge should never be a barrier to learning, and OER provides a stream of high-quality educational opportunities for students around the world. Creative Commons was among our first OER grantees because it provides the backbone of OER’s infrastructure. As OER has grown in usage and as a field, Creative Commons has provided consistent support to our grantees. That work is now benefiting countless students all over the world who have been forced abruptly to switch to distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are lessons being learned about how well these materials can work that will carry over once the pandemic ends. 

CC: What challenges and/or barriers exist that may be stopping other philanthropic foundations from adopting open access policies? 

Larry Kramer: There are at least two sources of hesitation when it comes to embracing open access policies, both of which may apply more broadly than just to philanthropic foundations. First, there’s a lack of understanding about open licensing—what it is, why it matters, and how it works. Open access is an entirely new topic for many organizational leaders. Second, there is also hesitation to impose a new priority of this sort onto the culture of an organization or its grantees. A truly impactful open access policy has implications for every department in the organization—from technical assistance required from a legal team to the Communications Department’s choosing of images for the organization’s website. Change management is always difficult, and something this far-reaching can be a heavy undertaking. 

To encourage open access policies, Creative Commons could build on initiatives like the CC Certificate that approach the topic of open access from different perspectives. While the work itself is about legal licensing, open access can help solve a variety of problems, and it’s important to show that to organizational leaders—to offer stories about what works and how open access can help. It would also help to connect open access policies to other change management efforts that are undertaken at periodic intervals in philanthropic organizations. 

CC: As we look forward five to ten years, what do you think “success” looks like in regards to open access policy and advocacy?

Larry Kramer: The global COVID-19 pandemic has deepened and highlighted longtime inequities that have plagued access to education and basic healthcare around the world. It has also shown how important it is for people to be able to collaborate, learn together, and build on each other’s thinking. It would be wonderful if, in the wake of everything happening in 2020, nations around the world adopt policies that require all publicly funded research and learning resources to be openly licensed. Given the crisis of access to learning materials exposed by the need to use distance learning, we should see an increase in educational institutions’ support for creating and using OER. We would also welcome commitments from other foundations to join us in adopting open access policies so that efforts and products intended to benefit the public good can be owned and freely used by the public. 

Please consider donating to Creative Commons so that we can continue stewarding the CC licenses and building the open access tools and platforms individuals and organizations, like The Hewlett Foundation, use to share. If you’d like to learn more about implementing open access policies and utilizing open licenses, check out the CC Certificate course or this free ebook. 

Thank you to Larry Kramer for offering his time and thoughtful words, Neha Gohil for helping us pull this piece together, and the entire staff of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for their support. 

The post Open Access in Practice: A Conversation with President Larry Kramer of The Hewlett Foundation appeared first on Creative Commons.

In response to the global health emergency caused by COVID-19, we’ve seen an array of organizations, publications, and governments make COVID-19 related research open access. For example, the U.S. National Library of Medicine recently released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19)—a machine-readable coronavirus literature collection with over 29,000 articles available for text and data mining (TDM). 

These actions are not surprising given the urgency of the current situation. In our previous post, “Now Is the Time for Open Access Policies—Here’s Why” we explain that rapid and unrestricted access to scientific research and educational materials is necessary to overcome this crisis. However, while we applaud the recent moves by organizations, publishers, and governments to open access to scientific research related to COVID-19, we believe the same level of sharing should be applied to all scientific research. Not only for the public good but also for the good of science. Science can only function properly if results, data, and insights are made openly available. “Universality is a fundamental principle of science,” explains the open access consortium cOAlition S, “only results that can be discussed, challenged, and, where appropriate, tested and reproduced by others qualify as scientific.”

Put simply, open science is the best way to do science. This is why CC has consistently recommended the following best practices for sharing research openly:

• Zero embargo period so the public has immediate access 
• CC BY on the article so it’s available for TDM
• CC0 on the research data so other scientists can scrutinize the conclusions, replicate the study, and advance the science

In order to examine this issue further, as well as provide some guidance for scientific researchers and organizations specifically, we reached out to intellectual property and copyright law expert Dr. Lucie Guibault, an associate professor at the Schulich School of Law and associate director of the Law & Technology Institute at Dalhousie University.

Our conversation below is slightly edited for clarity and length. 

CC: Why does open access to scientific research and data matter in moments of crisis?

Dr. Guibault: When time is of the essence, like now with the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific research results must be made available as soon as possible so that other scientists, policymakers and the general population can rely on sound scientific data in their decision-making process. Contrary to the traditional publishing model, which puts scientific publications behind a paywall or puts a 6 to 12-month embargo on self-archiving (depositing scholarly research in an online repository or open archive), open access allows for immediate, worldwide access to scientific and scholarly publications. Actions based on new findings can be immediate. For example, open access to a broad corpus of articles can certainly help reduce duplication of work, but most of all it enables easy text and data mining (TDM) which leads to new insights and knowledge. Through TDM scientists can make predictions on where a virus will emerge, when it might peak, what drug might work, etc.

CC: Why do you think organizations are adopting open access policies and actions in response to this crisis?

Dr. Guibault: It must be because, in their line of activity, these organizations have discovered the tremendous advantage of having immediate, free access to current, replicable, reliable, verifiable scientific results upon which they can base sound and informed decisions. This would most likely not be possible if the vital research results were not made available under open access conditions, as the alternative is either to pay for access, to wait for the expiration of the embargo period, or to base their decision on less reliable sources.

CC: If an organization is interested in adopting an open access policy, what are the steps they need to take?

Dr. Guibault: Institutions should become more familiar with open access policy documents before making decisions about it. Administrators should read on and about the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, the Budapest Open Access Initiative and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. Once they know more about the issue, they should consider adhering to these three declarations. The next step is to develop a realistic implementation strategy.

CC: What advice would you give to researchers who are unaware or unsure about open access?

Dr. Guibault: Individual researchers who are unaware or unsure about open access should try to become familiar with the advantages and drawbacks of open access. Of course, it’s easier for a researcher if their institution has adhered to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment because it guarantees that the researcher’s individual efforts in publishing articles and releasing data under open access conditions will be rewarded. When the institution employing the researcher has no clear open access policy, researchers may be more hesitant to publish in open access journals, especially if high author processing charges are involved. Nevertheless, they should at least endeavor to always self-archive their publications.

CC: What impact do you think the COVID-19 crisis will have on open access policies? 

Dr. Guibault: Open access is in itself such a worthwhile goal that it shouldn’t need a catastrophe like the COVID-19 virus to push it forward. But if it did, it would be a very small consolation.

For guidance on implementing an open access policy or using the CC License Suite, please contact us at info@creativecommons.org—we’re here to help. 

Stop the spread of COVID-19 by taking these steps outlined by the WHO, including washing your hands for at least 20 seconds and social distancing.

The post Dr. Lucie Guibault on What Scientists Should Know About Open Access appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today is the International Day for Universal Access to Information (IDUAI).

You may be wondering why this day is necessary—particularly in 2019, when the average person is inundated with an estimated 34 gigabytes of information every day, from emails and text messages to Youtube videos and news programs. In fact, it’s easy to take information for granted. However, access to public information, in particular, is not universal.

“Although technology has increased the amount of information and systematized the collection of data, people and communities across the world still lack access to critical, public information,” explains Bushra Ebadi. As a researcher and Executive Committee Member of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, Bushra relies on public information to study and develop solutions for issues such as insecurity, corruption, inequality, and climate change.

Access to information “is an integral part of the right to freedom of expression” and “a key enabler towards inclusive knowledge societies.”

According to Moez Chakchouk, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, access to information “is an integral part of the right to freedom of expression” and “a key enabler towards inclusive knowledge societies.” Despite this, UNESCO says that many governments “do not have national legislation on access to information as a specific expression of the law,” otherwise known as freedom of information legislation. This means that millions of people do not have the right or the ability to access public information. Further, “Even when these laws exist they are not necessarily abided by,” adds Bushra, “there can be a lot of red tape to access information in a timely manner.”

This lack of access is particularly worrying for researchers and activists, like Bushra. Without universal, open access to data from governments or research institutions, for example, developing effective solutions to global problems is difficult.

A Closer Look At Government Data

Increasingly, governments are using tools like Creative Commons’ CC0 Public Domain Dedication (CC Zero) to maximize the “re-use of data and databases” by clarifying that these resources are in the public domain and not restricted by copyright. However, there are many instances when data collected by governments are not made easily accessible (e.g., through an online data portal or open source data set).

In 2017, the World Wide Web Foundation found that almost every country included in its Open Data Barometer report failed to adequately share important data with the public. For example, only 71% of the observed government data sets were published online, only 25% were available via an open license, and only 7% of government data sets were truly open—meaning they “can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose.” The Foundation also reported that many of the available data sets were “incomplete, out of date, of low quality, and fragmented.”

In her work, Bushra often relies on government data to conduct policy research, but has routinely experienced problems. “The relevance of the data is largely dependent on how and what information was collected, as well as the format it is available in,” she explains. While studying issues related to forced migration and gender discrimination in the Global South, for example, she found it difficult to access reliable data.

“By restricting access to those who can afford it or have power and privilege, we support a system and culture of elitism…”

To compensate for this lack of data, researchers must often rely on data collected by non-government entities—which are typically kept behind expensive paywalls. According to Bushra, this is particularly detrimental. “By restricting access to those who can afford it or have power and privilege, we support a system and culture of elitism in which a select group of people with access are able to dictate what is done with information and how it is used.”

The Power of Information

Universal, open access to public information, particularly government data, not only facilitates scientific collaboration and innovation, it also empowers communities that have been historically marginalized and silenced.

“Access to information is intrinsically tied to the right to know and the right to exist,” Bushra emphasizes, “and without access to information, citizens lack the tools they need to hold their governments and people in power accountable.”

Information is powerful—that’s why, even in 2019, the International Day for Universal Access to Information remains not only important, but necessary.

To learn more and get involved, visit UNESCO’s website or sign up for their newsletter.

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