The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has just released its ScienceImage library under a Creative Commons Attribution license. CSIRO has provided permission for anyone to freely use, repost and transform the collection’s 4000+ high definition images and videos.…
Geoscience Australia licenses Landsat 8 satellite images under CC BY
The terms of the new Landsat 8 satellite agreement between the governments of the United States and Australia acknowledge that Geoscience Australia (GA), like its senior partner the US Geological Survey, is committed to making more spatial data more readily…
Geoscience Australia to license Landsat 8 images under CC BY
The Landsat 8 satellite, to be launched in early 2013, is expected to be fully operational by May or June of that year. Once it begins capturing images and beaming them back, Geoscience Australia (GA) will publish them online for…
Nature Publishing Group introduces CC BY option
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has announced that it will introduce a CC Attribution (BY) as a licensing option for its authors publishing in Scientific Reports. The CC BY licence will be available to authors sumitting articles on or after 1…
Date claimer: Creative Commons for You, and for Government
Can’t get enough of CC? We will be making our way down to Canberra in about a month, so make sure you mark it in your diaries!
A free public seminar on the topic CC for You, and for Government, will be presented by Professor Anne Fitzgerald, Neale Hooper and Cheryl Foong on Friday, 4 November 2011, 9.00am – 3.30pm at National Library of Australia (Theatre at Lower ground floor), Parkes Place, ACT.
We want to make this event meaningful for you. If you have encountered any practical or operational issues in your personal or working environments, please contact Cheryl Foong at cheryl.foong@qut.edu.au. We will do our best to accomodate your interests.
For more details, updates and to RSVP, please visit the event page.
Credits—Photo: ‘The National Library of Australia and the Canberra Balloon Festival, March 2011‘ by Grey Nomad Australia, licensed under CC BY 2.0 Generic.
New biodiversity atlas encourages sharing of knowledge
The Atlas of Living Australia is a new Australian Government collaborative initiative led by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Acting as a portal, the Atlas facilitates users to explore, combine and analyse information and data on Australian plants and animals. It includes authoritative species lists and classifications, mapping and identification tools, images, literature and occurrence records contributed by a number of data providers.
To help support that aim, the Atlas encourages contributing data providers to license their contributions under a Creative Commons licence. Specifically, because the Atlas wants to ensure content is open for downstream use, the Atlas does not support licensing under either of the two No Derivative Works licences.
Credits—Photo: Adaptation (crop and resize) of ‘Superb Lyre Bird 1‘ by Ian Sanderson, CC BY-NC 2.0 Generic.
More on Government Data – Geoscience Australia goes CC
We know we’ve been publishing a lot about licensing of government documents and data of late, but there really has been so much happening that we just can’t resist. This week’s story is one we’ve actually been meaning to post about for a while.
As of late November Geoscience Australia has officially adopted Creative Commons Attribution as the default licence for its website. This means more than 18 877 products available through the website, including 3690 datasets, are now free to be reused, repurposed and remixed, including for commercial purposes – as long as you attribute Geoscience Australia as the original source, of course.
Credits—Photo: ‘Shattuck_23096-1, Uluru, NT‘ by SouthernAnts, CC BY 2.0 Generic.
Bureau of Meteorology to release water data under CC
Photo: Zen Water by darkpatator
For Australia water (or the lack of it) is a big deal. So big in fact, that the Commonwealth Government saw the need to establish a national initiative for monitoring and publishing water data. Charging the Bureau of Meteorology with the task, their Improving Water Information Program will aggregate hundreds of other government departments’ and agencies’ information into the National Water Account, an integrated, national water monitoring and data collection service. And the Bureau are encouraging their partners to release their data under Creative Commons.