Over at the main Creative Commons blog, Diane Peters has the scoop on draft 3 of the CC0 public domain waiver, a tool for those who wish to relinquish their rights under copyright to a work, and mark it with machine-readable metadata for harvesting as part of the public domain. It is this type of tool that Science Commons advocates using in our Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data, a method for legally integrating scientific databases regardless of the country of origin. The goal of the protocol, to use Catriona MacCallum’s phrase: increasing the “Lego factor” for scientific data.
The news, in brief: Creative Commons had added additional language to the CC0 waiver to ensure that it makes sense and can be useful for people across the globe. ...
Creative Commons plans to take CC0 out of beta in late October or early November, and comments on this draft are due on September 26. If you’d like to check out the waiver or weigh in, visit the newly updated CC0 Wiki and subscribe to the cc-licenses mailing list.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
