Over the last year we’ve been working on developing two new projects: the Open Policy Network and the Institute for Open Leadership. Both of these initiatives arise out of a direct identified need from the Creative Commons community. Let’s explain a bit more about each of these projects. Overview Over the last several years, Creative…

At the age of 15, Jack Andraka developed a new method for detecting a rare type of pancreatic cancer. Like all scientific discoveries, Jack’s research built on the work of other researchers. Unlike those researchers, however, he lacked access to the expensive scholarly databases usually paid for by their universities. Fortunately, open access databases carrying…

GS2013 Final Day in Hall / Ibtihel Zaatouri / CC BY-SA You might remember our announcement a few months ago that Cathy Casserly will be stepping down as CEO of Creative Commons this year. Today, we’re excited to officially open the search for the new CEO. Our friends at m/Oppenheim Associates are helping to coordinate…

thank you note for every language / woodleywonderworks / CC BY As we take stock of our achievements in 2013 and plan our legal work for the year ahead, we would be remiss not to pause and express our deepest gratitude to the many individuals and organizations whose contributions made one of CC’s most significant…

Here’s another end of year list: all the awesome things the School of Open community accomplished in 2013. Last year, we highlighted the work we put into materializing School of Open as a concrete entity with goals and people involved. This year, we actually launched the School with a full set of online courses and…

Invest in a more creative world.Support Creative Commons. Sudanese political cartoonist Khalid Albaih pushes boundaries with his art to reach new viewers and ignite change. “People should support Creative Commons if they care about what they’re doing, and they want to get their work to as many people as possible; if they care about collaborating…

In November we released version 4.0 of the Creative Commons license suite, and today the Open Definition Advisory Council approved the CC 4.0 Attribution (BY) and Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) International licenses as conformant with the Open Definition. The Open Definition sets out principles that define “openness” in relation to data and content…It can be summed up…

Last month, Creative Commons and several other groups responded to the European Commission’s consultation on licensing, datasets and charging for the re-use of public sector information (PSI). See our response here. There were 355 submissions to the questionnaire (spreadsheet download), apparently from all EU Member States except Cyprus. The Commission hosted a hearing (PDF of…

[written in collaboration with Shanan Peters, Professor, Department of GeoScience, University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Principal Investigator of the Paleodb Project] now available under After a year of community feedback and discussion, the Paleobiology Database has taken the decision that “All records are made available to the public based on a Creative Commons license that…

The New UNESCO House in Paris United Nations Photo / CC BY-NC-ND UNESCO has announced a new Open Access Repository making more than 300 digital reports, books and articles available to the world under the Creative Commons IGO licenses. From UNESCO’s press release: “Currently, the Repository contains works in some 12 languages, including major UNESCO…