Nami Writes - Nami's Blog

Creative Commons Licensing for Research Supporters

I work as a data steward. As part of my job, I advise researchers to make their work as open as possible, so that the knowledge can be shared widely.

But I always ask myself--am I doing the same to myself? Am I walking the talk?

For each documentation that I type, or presentation that I give, I started to ask myself, "Can I share this?"

The answer is usually, yes. You can see my work on my ResearchEquals profile.

I often advise researchers to make their data "as open as possible, as closed as necessary". I think this principle also applies for the information that we produce as research support professionals.

Sharing as much as possible makes sense as a research supporter #

As a data steward, or research support professional, it makes sense to share my work as much as possible. The university that employs me triumphs that "openness is in our DNA", and that "[w]e share our research results, our lectures, our people and our facilities with partners who work with us for a better world." (p.13 TU/e Strategy 2030)

With the move towards Open Science and Open Education, it makes sense to share more.

Corporate Forces Eroding us towards "Closeness by Default" #

But, sharing is not people's DNA everywhere. In corporate settings, for example, closeness is the default. Businesses usually protect their expertise as "trade secrets".

And I suspect that universities are also increasingly corporatized. Everything needs to be enterprise-ready. Universities are keen to adopt technologies if they are already used by big corporations. For example, most universities in the Netherlands use Microsoft or Google as their backbone IT infrastructure.

Any pieces of technology carries culture. Using big-tech, closed, "enterprise", technology can erode our DNA of openness as universities.

Using Creative Commons Licenses to get back to "openness by default" #

How can we counter to this push towards closeness, and get back to our core value of openness? One way is to consider university's work as public good, created by contribution from the society (public money).

From this perspective, our obligation becomes clear: we must give back to the society. How to do so? Sharing materials as much as possible, freely not as in beer but also as freedom.

But, due to the automatic copyright, just making information publicly available does not complete this obligation.

Using a Creative Commons license can solve this issue. The license is widely accepted, and has stood through tests of the courts.

My suggestion is to create an organization policy that adopts the openness by default, for the work output by the university.

What we can share as Research Support Professionals #

As research support professionals, we have many things to share. They may include:

  1. Presentations for training and workshop

  2. Preparation notes for training and workshop

  3. Guidelines for researchers (e.g., storage, how-to's, data management plan guides)

  4. Ways of working and collaborating (e.g., how we structure our meetings, how to communicate with each other)

Of course, not everything can be shared #

Of course, there are things that cannot be shared, such as personal communications, or legal agreements, especially when they include sensitive information.

But, I'd tend to think that most work that we provide to researchers can be shared by default.

The question currently I hear is, "Why do you share this material?" It's as if I need to justify every time I share something. Instead, we should be asking ourselves, "Why do you keep it the closed?" If there is no good reason, we should share it.

Starting small towards a policy, from within #

I want to start with the team closest to me, my Data Steward team to start working towards a policy. To begin, I want to see if we agree with the following:

  1. Agree on using a Creative Commons License on any work that we share with our researchers by default. Exceptions should be always explained and documented.

  2. Agree on which license we should use. For example, should we use Share-Alike? Should we use Non Commercial? I'm curious to see what my colleagues think about this.

After we agree on licensing, I'd like to track our impact. The impact can be inward-looking (e.g., how aligned this licensing is for our mission) and outward-looking (e.g., how much work is produced and reused).

I wrote this blog post as my assignment submission for the course, Creative Commons Certificate for Educators. I drew inspirations from the course materials.