The policy will require that all research outputs published by the Bank be licensed under CC BY as a default. For work created by Bank staff, the policy covers manuscripts and all accompanying data sets.  These OA publications will be made available through the Bank’s Open Knowledge Repository.

What makes these moves so significant? How can open access contribute to the goal of eliminating poverty? How does it impact Bank’s researchers and authors? How will the OKR benefit users of Bank knowledge, in particular those in developing countries?

World Bank will be hosting an event in Washington DC on Monday 21 May to discuss these questions. The event will be livestreamed in English, Spanish and French, and features:

• Peter Suber | Director of the Harvard Open Access Project and a leading voice in the open access movement
• Michael Carroll | American University law professor and founding board member of Creative Commons
• Cyril Muller | Vice President for External Affairs at the World Bank
• Adam Wagstaff | Research Manager of the World Bank’s Development Research Group.

See World Bank Live for more details.

Adapt is led by staff from the University of Tasmania, in partnership with Monash University, The University of Queensland and The University of Western Australia and funded by the Australian Government’s Office for Learning and Teaching.

Over the coming months, Adapt will launch the repository and open it to contributions, so keep an eye out on Adapt’s home page, or follow their updates on Facebook or Twitter.

The first step was taken in 2010, with the release of the 2010-11 budget papers under CC BY.

The collaborative initiative between the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) at QUT, Creative Commons Australia, the ABC and Wikimedia Commons, has brought footage of Australian culture and history to a global audience for the first time.

The project has released 20 Australian historical video clips from the ABC archives under a Creative Commons licence to Wikimedia Commons, a media file repository that provides freely-licensed educational media content – images, sound and video clips – to everyone.

Professor Brian Fitzgerald, a chief investigator at CCI and board member at Creative Commons, said under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Australia licence, the clips could be copied, edited, remixed and shared, even for commercial purposes, as long as the licence conditions are complied with.

He and QUT Professor Anne Fitzgerald, Creative Commons Australia’s project leader for engagement with the public sector, have been collaborating with the ABC since 2008 to maximise the value of its archival material by licensing it for wider sharing.

They have been working in partnership with ABC Pool, a social media project for online collaboration.

The historic clips made available for reuse include a rare 1974 interview with 2001: A Space Odyssey author Arthur C. Clarke predicting the internet, the introduction of World Series Cricket and the 1998 waterfront confrontation.

The videos appear as part of the ABC 80th anniversary website 80 Days that Changed our Lives.

Professor Brian Fitzgerald said that prior to being launched, the video clips were only found in the ABC archives.

“The recent release of these materials by the ABC is a significant step towards allowing greater public access to Australian culture and history. It has generated considerable interest and is to be applauded,” he said.

“It is crucial for public organizations like the ABC to consider whether they can make more of this publicly-owned material available to the public for access as it is a primary ingredient for social, cultural and economic innovation, and can be used for many purposes, including education and research.

“Providing open access to information means making it free to obtain, to reuse and to share, and Creative Commons plays an important part in promoting this.

“The way that these materials from the ABC archives have been integrated into Wikipedia to reach a far broader audience is a great example of how this can be achieved.”

For our earlier post on this, see this page.

When: 20 June –  3 July 2012 (to coincide with the UNESCO World OER Congress in Paris).

Where: Online

Cost: Free

Registrations for the OCL4Ed Workshop are now open:  Register today to reserve your seat.

The OER Foundation is aiming to break their previous OCL4Ed record of 1067 registrations, so please share the gift of knowledge and invite colleagues and friends to join this free workshop.