We are thrilled to announce today that Dr. Tarek Loubani has been awarded the 2020 Bassel Khartabil Fellowship. Loubani is the medical director of Glia, a project focused on using Open Access manufacturing and distribution in order to provide lower costs and vastly increase the accessibility of urgently needed medical supplies and gear. The Fellowship…

The global health crisis is crystalizing the need for policies that support universal access to learning resources. The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on over a billion learners’ lives—half of the world’s student population have seen their schools or universities close to slow the spread of the virus. As a result, many educational institutions are…

"The Chancellor Rishi Sunak visits a coronavirus testing laboratory in Leeds," by HM Treasury, licensed CC BY-NC-SA.

In response to the global health emergency caused by COVID-19, we’ve seen an array of organizations, publications, and governments make COVID-19 related research open access. For example, the U.S. National Library of Medicine recently released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19)—a machine-readable coronavirus literature collection with over 29,000 articles available for text and data mining…

We are proud to announce that Creative Commons (CC) will once again be participating as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreachy. GSoC and Outreachy are both programs focused on introducing open-source software development to a wider audience. They provide stipends to work on a 3-month project for the open source…

Over the weekend, news emerged that upset even the most ardent skeptics of open access. Under the headline, “Trump vs Berlin” the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported that President Trump offered $1 billion USD to the German biopharmaceutical company CureVac to secure their COVID-19 vaccine “only for the United States.” In response, Jens Spahn, the…

Last week, the Unicode Consortium released the latest version of the Unicode Standard—the universal character coding system used in computer processing (which includes the international emoji portfolio ?). We’re thrilled to announce that Creative Commons (CC) license symbols were included in this new release. The latest Unicode Standard adds 5,930 characters, including 4 new scripts,…

CC Catalog API (V1), featuring icons by Icons by Mikicon (left) and Faisal (right) via Noun Project, CC BY

The Creative Commons Catalog Application Programming Interface (CC Catalog API) gives developers the ability to create custom applications that utilize CC Search, a rich collection of 330 million and counting openly licensed images. We have spent the last two years gathering this data from a diverse set of 28 sources, ranging from curated collections assembled…

"Working from home," by Victoria Heath, CC BY.

Over the last few days, a growing number of organizations have shut down their offices and told employees to work from home in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Here at Creative Commons (CC), we’ve also taken necessary precautions such as postponing all work-related travel and canceling the in-person component of the annual CC…

"Bhavna Ben Ramesh" by Paul Bronstein (2015), CC BY-NC.

Storytelling is a powerful tool because it can change perceptions and inspire action—and images are an essential component. As Depression-era American photojournalist and documentarian Dorothea Lange said, “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”  Unfortunately, finding high-quality and diverse openly licensed images, particularly those of women, is a…

Since the early days of the Creative Commons movement, the annual CC Global Summit has been one of the most important vehicles for bringing people in our community together to share their work, ideas, and vision for the future of Open. Unfortunately, given the current concerns around the global spread of COVID-19 (and in the…