The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) is a UK-based charity that “seeks to transform the lives of poor and vulnerable children in developing countries.” Yesterday the foundation announced its first Transparency Policy, which requires its grantees and consultants to widely disseminate resources they create under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).

We aim to make as much content as possible freely available through open licensing, such as a Creative Commons license. This includes development work, research and data funded by CIFF. For instance, CIFF-funded peer-reviewed research articles which would have gone behind a publication’s pay-wall will now be freely available.

In addition to requiring open licensing for grant-funded materials like presentations and reports, CIFF has taken a progressive approach to data sharing.

CIFF believes that providing access to research plans and research data permits healthy scrutiny of evidence, reduces duplication of effort, and enables secondary uses of data, which improves efficiency of resourcing.

The foundation “expects that all data created using grant funds should be released into the public domain” using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication.

Like other foundations, CIFF realizes that there may be cases where exceptions to the default open license may be warranted.

The organization has also developed an implementation guide to help staff and grantees understand the open policy requirements. This guide is licensed under CC BY, and was a remix based on the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Licensing Toolkit for Staff (also licensed under CC BY).

Creative Commons is happy to have been able to work with CIFF as they developed their open licensing policy over the last year. Congratulations to the foundation for this important policy adoption! It’s fantastic to see philanthropic organizations from around the world working together to populate the commons and increase the global impact of their charitable giving.