At the "What to Teach Biologists about Computing" meeting (discussed here, a bit) we received a strong message from Our Dear MozSciLabLeader, Kaitlin Thaney. The message was this: if we want to maximize reuse and remixing of educational materials, we should explicitly license them under CC0. (See her talk and writeup on data sharing for more info.)

Done..

All of our educational material -- specifically, our ANGUS/Next-Generation Sequence Analysis course material -- was under CC-BY-SA, a contaminatory license requiring attribution. They are now under CC0. This allows anyone and everyone to make use of them.

I got permission from the all the authors within about 24 hours of sending the e-mail inquiry, so that was nice :)

Here are some stats for the materials, coming from Google Analytics:

• 118,603 unique visitors since June 2010;
• 211,170 visits;
• 528,999 page views;

Not a terribly high traffic site, although in the last year, we've had:

• 73,640 unique visitors (since July 10, 2012);
• 121,497 visits;
• 266,893 page views;

so half or more just in the last year.

Anyhoo, enjoy!

--titus

p.s. This follows my decision several years back to go BSD instead of GPL on code. While Stallman is presumably swiveling in his Aeron, I think that as an academic I need to worry more about relevance and utility by maximizing reuse, than about anything else. My code, my call.

p.p.s. Note, academics should still cite us. It's only polite :)