A4L Community embracing Creative Commons to continue open development

WASHINGTON - July 18, 2017 - PRLog -- The Access 4 Learning (A4L) Community Board of Directors have recently approved openly licensing all globally developed SIF Implementation Specifications under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike International 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.  All of the content in these education data interoperable blueprint documents is now available for reuse under CC BY-SA.

The A4L Community is aligning with Creative Commons to reduce barriers to adoption, continue open development and allow for greater usage of Community developed products.  Similar to the mission of the A4L Community, whose focus is on open standards and data interoperability, Creative Commons mission is to provide legal tools that enable organizations to share and reuse knowledge which has been applied to over 1.2 billion works on the web."By openly licensing their education specifications, A4L is leading the charge to make technical specifications open for all to innovate and share best practices in educational data," says Dr. Cable Green, Director of Open Education at Creative Commons.

All SIF Implementation Specifications, now 33 internationally, are based on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) endorsed Extensible Markup Language (XML) which is not linked to a specific operating system. XML is both 'platform independent and vendor neutral' and defines common data formats and rules of interaction and architecture. Every SIF Specification release consists of two major components: a) the Data Model which includes the set of XML schemas that define the payload formats of educational "objects" as they are exchanged between SIF-compliant applications and b) the Infrastructure which defines the transport and messaging functionality of the secure and robust "wire" over which those payloads are securely exchanged.  Providing these documents under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlikelicense expresses the A4L Community's commitment to openly develop technical standards for the management, movement and usage of learning information.

"A4L is doing something unique in the standards space by applying Creative Commons licensing to its specifications and work products", touts Jason Wrage, President OVRTR. "We believe that openness and standards can and should go hand in hand. Similar to the growth that has been seen with open content, we want to drive the adoption of open technology standards because no one approach, solution, or vendor platform can meet the interoperability needs of the education world. A4L and the SIF standards openly embrace and integrate applications and data to provide data use and automation benefits to users."

Proposed Revised Permissions and Copyright
© Copyright Access 4 Learning Community. Some Rights Reserved.
The SIF Implementation Specifications are available under an Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA 4.0 International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Entities must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. Modifications of this license and derivatives need to be licensed under the same terms, but not other works in the compilation or collection. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.  If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.  Entities may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

About the Access 4 Learning Community
There is no other global community made up of educational policymakers, marketplace product and service providers and the customers they serve, collaborating daily to address real word learning information and resource issues.

The Access 4 Learning (A4L) Community, previously the SIF Association, is a unique, non-profit collaboration composed of schools, districts, local authorities, states, US and International Ministries of Education, software vendors and consultants who collectively address all aspects of learning information management and access to support learning.  The A4L Community is "Powered by SIF" Specifications as its major technical tool to allow for this management and access simply, securely and in a scalable, standard way regardless of the platform hosting those applications. The Access 4 Learning Community has united these education technology end users and providers in an unprecedented effort to give teachers more time to do what they do best: teach. For further information, visit www.A4L.org

Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization at the center of an international movement to promote sharing of creativity and knowledge. CC's goal is to help realize the full potential of the Internet—universal access to research and education, full participation in culture—to drive a new era of development growth, and productivity. CC provides the well-known suite of open licenses that have become the global standard used by governments, companies, institutions and individuals across culture, education, science, and more to promote digital collaboration and innovation. The CC licenses are everywhere—1.2+ billion CC licenses in use across 9 million websites—making it easy for anyone to use and re-use content. To find out more, please visit creativecommons.org