Connection, Collaboration, and Community: Creative Commons

Collaboration: Need of Scholarly Communication

Communication is the key of scholarship. New researches are based on scholarly communication of other thinkers. Timely communication triggers new ideas, avoids redundancy in efforts and keeps the researchers on the right path. Free flow of authentic information is the essence of scholastic development which leads to overall welfare of the world. This need of sharing of information is as old as the mankind. Researchers developed their own modes of sharing information with like-minded people such as invisible college, private networks, cryptic messages etc. Digital information and internet made sharing of knowledge faster and efficient.

Academic norms have always promoted open sharing of research findings and creative scholarship. Internet and digital information introduced new ways of collaboration and sharing of information. A few are discussed below.

Open Source Initiative

The campaign was launched in 1998. Open source is a term describing a means of developing and distributing software that ensures software is available for use, modification, and redistribution by anyone. The open source community promotes the creation of software that is not proprietary, resulting in lower costs. Generally, anyone can download open source software for little or no cost, and can use, share, borrow, or change it without restriction. A major advantage to open source code is the ability for a variety of different people to edit and fix problems and errors that have occurred. Naturally because there are more people who can edit the material there are more people who can help make the information more credible and reliable. The open source mission statement promises better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in. For almost every requirement ranging from accounting to audio recording and project management to screenplay writing there is a powerful open source solution is available as an option to expensive commercial software. To name a few: Mozilla Firefox (Web Browser), VLC Media Player (Portable Multimedia Player), encoder, and streamer, Odoo (Business Application), Gimp (Graphic Application), etc.

E-Book Initiative

Project Gutenberg is a first E book initiative in the world, established by Michael S. Hart in 1971. It is aimed to digitize the books in public domain and make it available to readers across the globe. Many more such projects are initiated worldwide. To name a few: Google books, internet archive, Europeana, Open library, etc.

Open Access Journals

Open access (OA) journals are scholarly journals that are available online to the reader without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. While open access journals are freely available to the reader, there are still costs associated with the publication and production of such journals. Some are subsidized, and some require payment on behalf of the author. The Directory of Open Access Journals currently lists over 9428 open access journals.

Open Institutional Repositories

An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Worldwide institutions are starting to implement digital institutional repositories to improve the visibility, usage and impact of research conducted by the institution. Institutional repository can be accessed by anyone interested irrespective of geographical barriers through the internet. The Directory of Open Access Repositories currently lists over 3345 open access repositories.

Open Courseware

OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. The OpenCourseWare movement started in 1999 when the University of Tübingen in Germany published videos of lectures online. The OCW movement only took off, however, with the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University in October 2002. Next many educational institutions joined the movement. To name a few: Coursera, Edx, udacity, Khan academy, etc.