It has been a long time since we’ve posted a proper update on Creative Commons license adoption statistics, so a presentation on this topic was eagerly awaited at this year’s Creative Commons international meetings at the iSummit.

I led off with an overview presentation (PDF; Scribd; Slideshare). Here are the major points:

• Metrics based on search engine queries are conceptually straightforward but highly volatile and hard to verify, but the overall growth trend looks good.
• We’re also seeing strong growth at leading CC-enabled content repositories and strong growth of innovative CC-enabled repositories.
• Upcoming challenges including measuring reuse.
• Big mistake: not encouraging rigorous outside analysis by people who know something about statistics long ago.

With that last point in mind, I’ve been thrilled to be in correspondence with Giorgos Cheliotis of Singapore Management University. Giorgos had been doing independent research on open culture and digital media ecosystem topics, including Creative Commons adoption. He has academic papers on the subject in the works and we were very lucky to have him give us a taste at the iSummit. View his presentation: (PDF; Scribd; Slideshare).

While the presentation is based on a snapshot from early this year, it includes some very interesting findings, including an experimental index based on license choices in different jurisdictions (e.g., Sweden seems to be the most liberal so far), while Spain is the standout in terms of overall Creative Commons adoption.

I’m really eager to see the results of this research published and for future research taking into account time series data and additional sources. In the meantime Giorgos’ presentation is the place to start if you’re interested in CC license adoption statistics. If you’re a researcher with interest in this topic see contact information in the presentation.

Addendum: Giorgos summarizes the main findings on his blog.