Image by Flickr user Globalism Pictures (CC-BY)
I am graduating today, and along with my faculty advisors and my family, I have Creative Commons to thank.
Not long before graduation I received a friendly email reminder informing me that I still needed to submit a capstone paper to complete my Ed.S. degree in Instructional Technology & Learning Sciences. I had just moved and started a new job that was keeping me very busy. I didn’t have time to write a capstone paper from scratch, and it looked like I would need to delay my graduation.
Fortunately I have written many articles as a graduate student. Surely I could republish one of my earlier papers, couldn’t I? The answer I got from my advisors was “no” because the rights to all my published papers were now owned by publishers. All except one. I had written a report for Creative Commons while working as a consultant on their Student Journalism 2.0 project. The report was openly licensed with a CC-BY license, which meant I had permission to modify and republish it to fit the requirements of the capstone paper.
So as I celebrate my graduation here from the OpenCourseWare Consortium Global conference, I am grateful to Creative Commons who helped make it possible. This is yet another example of how being open can be useful in unexpected ways. Thanks, CC!
Great job Tom! Excellent practical use of the tools and utilities that are available in your field of study.
Thanks Dave! It’s nice to be done with the “formal academic student” phase.
Congrats. I found myself looking for the like button, but I’ll leave you a comment instead. 🙂 Seriously, though, it makes you wonder how long before the current publisher stranglehold on IP in the research world breaks.
It will happen gradually, but I see more and more people becoming aware of the benefits of “open” and moving to more those forms of publishing.