Last week the William and Flora Hewlett Foundationannouncedthat it is extending its open licensing policy to require that all content (such as reports, videos, white papers) resulting from project grant funds be licensed under the most recent Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. From the Foundation’s blog post: “We’re making this change because we believe that this kind of broad, open, and free sharing of ideas benefits not just the Hewlett Foundation, but also our grantees, and most important, the people their work is intended to help.” The change is explained in more detail on the foundation’swebsite.
The foundation had a long-standing policy requiring that recipients of its Open Educational Resources grants license the outputs of those grants; this was instrumental in the creation and growth of the OER field, which continues to flourish and spread. Earlier this year, the license requirement was extended to all Education Program grants, and as restated, the policy will now be rolled out to all project-based grants under any foundation program. The policy is straightforward: it requires that content produced pursuant to a grant be made easily available to the public, on the grantee’s website or otherwise, under the CC BY 4.0 license — unless there is some good reason to use a different license.
休利特基金会的总顾问伊丽莎白·彼得斯(Elizabeth Peters)说:“当我们开始考虑将政策从OER拨款扩展到整个基金会时，我们想确保我们不会造成不可预见的问题。”“所以我们首先扩大了它的范围，覆盖了OER之外的教育补助金。我们很高兴地发现，问题很少，而且这些问题很容易解决。对于所有资助的作品，CC BY现在将是默认的，但我们愿意接受有说服力的理由采取不同的路径。这项政策的最终目标是让我们资助的内容对每个人更加开放。我们只是刚刚开始实施这一改变，并将继续监测其工作方式，但到目前为止，我们发现大多数受让人已经准备好并愿意申请许可，使他们的作品完全开放，供各种类型的重用。”
In practice, the new policy means that nearly all of the extensive content produced with Hewlett project-based grant funds–not only works specifically commissioned as Open Educational Resources, but scholarly research, multimedia materials, videos, white papers, and more, created by grantees on subjects of critical importance–will be widely available for downstream re-use with only the condition that the creator is attributed. Text will be openly available for translation into foreign languages, and high-quality photographs and videos will be able to be re-used on platforms such as Wikipedia. Releasing grant funded content under permissive open licenses like CC BY means that these materials can be more easily shared and re-used by the public. And they can be combined with other resources that are also published under an open license: this collection grows larger every day as governments and other publicly-facing institutions adopt open policies. Promoting this type of sharing can benefit both the original creator and the foundation, as it enables novel uses in situations not intended by the original grant funding.
For a long time Creative Commons has been interested in promoting open licensing policies within philanthropic grantmaking. We received a grant from the Hewlett Foundation to survey the licensing policies of private foundations, and to work toward increasing the free availability of foundation-supported works. Wewroteabout the progress of the project in March, and we’ve been maintaining alistof foundation IP policies, and amodel IP policy.
We urge other foundations and funding bodies to emulate the outstanding leadership demonstrated by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and commit to making open licensing an essential component of their grantmaking strategy.
