Millions of people use research everyday. From students, medical professionals, to curious hobbyists, we all benefit from being able to access, read, and cite reliable, tested information. But getting the research we need can be hard and costly when it's locked up behind expensive paywalls.

Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators. Today Open Knowledge and the Open Definition Advisory Council announced the release of version 2.0 of the Open Definition. The Definition âsets out principles that define openness in relation to data and content,â and is the baseline from which various public licenses are measured.

Judging by the mainstream media, the most pressing problems facing capitalism are 1) income inequality, the subject of Thomas Piketty's bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century , and 2) the failure of free markets to regulate their excesses, a common critique encapsulated by Paul Craig Roberts' recent book The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism .

This article is primarily about structural change in the global economy. But Smith notes, "[T]he middle class that has paid for its ever-expanding consumption with rising wages is in structural decline due to the displacement of human labor by software; and the state's ability to manage structural crises while protecting global cartel profits is being undermined...by the ever rising costs of providing healthcare and income security and paying the external costs of environmental damage." He goes on, "What could replace the current iteration of global state-capitalism? If we assemble these three potentially transformative dynamics-degrowth, the recoupling of risk and loss, and entrepreneurial mobile capital-we discern a new and potentially productive teleological arc to global capitalism, one that moves from a capitalism based on financial hyper-centralization and obsession with rising consumption to one focused on more efficient use of resources and capital via decentralization and localized innovation." We might ponder how open access/open knowledge can play a role these transformative dynamics.

As throngs of pro-democracy protesters continue to organize in Hong Kong's central business district, many of them are messaging one another through a network that doesn't require cell towers or Wi-Fi nodes. They're using an app called FireChat that launched in March and is underpinned by mesh networking, which lets phones unite to form a temporary Internet.

President Barack Obama marked the Open Government Partnership's (OGP) third anniversary by announcing that in addition to the commitments outlined in the current U.S.

It's Banned Books Week! An annual event held in the last week of September, Banned Books Week seeks to draw attention to books being banned or challenged in libraries and schools while promoting free and open access to knowledge.

Need photos? Download CC0 photos for free. Looking for a unique, high quality picture for your web site, blog or magazine? Download these free license photos and use them however you want, even commercially.

For those that haven't seen it, Richard Stallman's dystopian short story, written in 1997, on a dilemma posed by the use of computers and licensed content in the mid 21st century.

By Cory Doctorow - Share this article This article is based on a keynote speech to the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, Dec. 2011. General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they're for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them.

This is a charged essay on the challenges to computing freedom in light of copyright, digital rights management (DRM), piracy (SOPA) and related issues. The author argues for the need to examine and, at user's discretion, shut down backdoor programs that monitor and/or enforce limits of fair use.

This post (from a royalty-free stock database) summarizes acceptable and unacceptable practices for the fair use of music. Topics include sheet music, research, recordings, and copies. There are also links to related topics, e.g. copyright law, Creative Commons licensing, rules of fair use, etc.

Josh Woodward is one of the most prolific musicians in the Creative Commons community. His songs have been downloaded six and a half million times. His songs are all licensed under CC's most open license for maximum sharing, commercial or noncommercial. And he presents instrumental and lyrical mixes for most of his songs, allowing for easy reuse in video.

For fun -- and to demonstrate the power of the creative commons -- CC has created a new Tumblr that features random content from artists using creative commons licensing. Each day features a new "thing," putting subscribers (via email or bookmark) and artists in contact.

Librarians in Massachusetts are working to give their patrons a chance to opt-out of pervasive surveillance. Partnering with the ACLU of Massachusetts, area librarians have been teaching and taking workshops on how freedom of speech and the right to privacy are compromised by the surveillance of online and digital communications -- and what new privacy-protecting services they can offer patrons to shield them from unwanted spying of their library activity.

The following is a feature article from the new intern issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books: The Magazine. The issue, which our interns produced as part of this past summer's LARB Publishing Course, comes off press at the end of the month and will be mailed to subscribing LARB members...

A book with ideas along the line of participatory culture, "panarchy"... The information revolution - which is as much an organizational as a technological revolution - is transforming the nature of conflict across the spectrum: from open warfare, to terrorism, crime, and even radical social activism.

We rely on your support to further our mission to understand birds and other wildlife, to involve the public in scientific discovery, and to use our knowledge to protect our planet. Each day, bird watchers report tens of thousands of bird observations to citizen-science projects at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, contributing to the world's most dynamic and powerful source of information on birds.

The following post was created in collaboration with members of the CC China Mainland Affiliate team and the School of Open community. Below is a description of the 2nd CC China Mainland open educational resources (OER) summer camp (30th June to 8th July 2014) for the children of Luxi Island, a remote island off the coast of China.