Make Openness part of the process

From Open Access News:

UAuckland to embed CC metadata for theses in its IR

03:43 01/03/2008, Gavin Baker, Open Access News

Michelle Thorne, University of Auckland embeds CC licensing, Creative Commons blog, February 28, 2008.

The University of Auckland has just announced that they have embedded Creative Commons licensing for all new submissions by PhD students into the university’s digital repository, ResearchSpace.
From the repository’s librarian Leonie Hayes:

“At the moment the showcase collection is PhD theses, there are nearly 800 in the PhD collection, most are open access. There are another 900 awaiting signoff from authors. When new graduates submit online they have a choice of adding a CC licence along with their consent for a digital copy.
We are also investigating application of Creative Commons licenses to our other digital collections.” …

PMR: This is the right way to promote Openness. Make it part of the process.  Put it into authoring tools, software for computation and simulation, for data analysis. So that when someone produces something useful Open Access and Open Data are part of the environment. It also helps to educate the generation of students and other scientists (though actually they are doing most of the educating – to us). 3-4 years of this and even the most conservative staff will become aware of the process.
We should do this in Blue Obelisk and other software. Create a licence which is emitted by every run of the program and requires conscious effort to remove (or setting a non-default input flag).