Cetis has a long history of supporting all aspects of open innovation in education, including open standards, open source software, open policy, open data and open educational resources, so we are very pleased to join the Open Policy Network which launched worldwide this week with the following press release:
The Open Policy Network, or OPN for short, is a coalition of organizations and individuals working to support the creation, adoption, and implementation of policies that require that publicly funded resources are openly licensed resources. The website of the Open Policy Network is http://openpolicynetwork.org
Increasingly, governments around the world are sharing huge amounts of publicly funded research, data, and educational materials. The key question is, do the policies governing the procurement and distribution of publicly funded materials ensure the maximum benefits to the citizens those policies are meant to serve? When open licenses are required for publicly funded resources, there is the potential to massively increase access to and re-use of a wide range of materials, from educational content like digital textbooks–to the results of scholarly research–to troves of valuable public sector data.
There is a pressing need for education, advocacy, and action to see a positive shift in supporting open licensing for publicly-funded materials. The Open Policy Network will share information amongst its members, recruit new advocates, and engage with policymakers worldwide. The OPN members are diverse in content area expertise and geographic location.
The Open Policy Network also announced their first project, the Institute for Open Leadership.
The Institute for Open Leadership will help train new leaders in education, science, and public policy fields on the values and implementation of openness in licensing, policies, and practices. Through a week long summit with experts, accepted fellows will get hands-on guidance to develop a capstone project for implementation in their organization or institution.
The work of the OPN is closely aligned with the recommendations of, the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Paris Open Educational Resources Declaration, the Cape Town Declaration, the Panton Principles and the Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest, and as such is also aligned with a number of Cetis initiatives including Open Scotland and the Scottish Open Education Declaration.
The Open Policy Network is free to join and all are welcome. More information on the Open Policy Network is available at the website, Google Group, Twitter, and Facebook.