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Category: Open Culture

Moving Institutions Toward Open—Building on 6 Years of the Open GLAM Survey

Open Culture
Violette Heymann, 1910” by Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916), The Cleveland Museum of Art, Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection ,CC0.

“Violette Heymann, 1910” by Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916), The Cleveland Museum of Art, Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection ,CC0. Creative Commons’ Open Culture Platform is supporting 25 institutions in opening up access to their collections by the end of 2025. Members of the Platform community will be working together to create a policy template, conduct outreach,…

A Quick Look at the CC Strategic Workshop on Open Heritage

Open Culture
A group of people standing together looking at the camera in a green garden. Cropped, Open Culture Strategic Workshop by Filipa Alfama, CC BY 4.0

One year after Creative Commons (CC) hosted an exploratory Open Culture Roundtable, in Lisbon, Portugal, which initiated the Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture (TAROC) global initiative, nearly 50 stakeholders from all continents gathered again for a strategic workshop, in Lisbon in May 2024. In this blog post, we share a snapshot of key highlights.

Recap & Recording: “Open Culture in the Age of AI: Concerns, Hopes and Opportunities”

Open Culture, Open Heritage
Black and grey image of speckled orbs in the background. In the foreground the text reads An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe. Plate XXXI. ”. By Thomas Wright. Public Domain

In May, CC’s Open Culture Program hosted a new webinar in our Open Culture Live series titled “Open Culture in the Age of AI: Concerns, Hopes and Opportunities.” In this blog post we share key takeaways and a link to the recording.

Open Culture Platform Activity Fund Winners 2024

Open Culture
Green and orange flowers illustrated in a scientific style. Plate 82” from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (1904), in which are depicted a selection of liverworts. Public Domain.

As part of the Open Culture Platform’s 2024 work plan, we at Creative Commons are offering funding for community activities. We called for proposals and invited the community to vote on the activities. The projects needed to have a focus on building community through outreach and helping institutions move toward open. Here are the four…

Celebrating the Public Domain in the Capital of Europe

Open Culture
Atomium in Brussels, photographed from below, in front of a clear blue sky. Prize winner of the Wikimedia Belgium Wiki Loves Monuments Photo Contest in 2023. Close-up of the Brussels' Atomium on a clear day By Geertivp, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Close-up_of_the_Brussels%27_Atomium_on_a_clear_day_(cropped).jpg

Last week, Creative Commons took part in the International Public Domain Day celebration at the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels. Two engaging roundtables were hosted, delving into copyright issues concerning the public domain and its future. The event united advocates for open access to cultural heritage, featuring presentations on topics like the monetization and decolonization of the public domain, as well as updates on the Europeana Public Domain Charter. Creative Commons introduced new guidelines published in February aimed at encouraging users to reference institutions when utilizing public domain cultural heritage materials.

Getty Museum releases 88K+ images of artworks with CC0

Open Heritage
Close up of vivid orange flowers and blue irises growing above red-ochre soil. Irises, 1889” by Vincent van Gogh, The J. Paul Getty Museum is dedicated to the public domain by CC0.

The J. Paul Getty Museum just released more than 88 thousand works under Creative Commons Zero (CCØ), putting the digital images of items from its impressive collection squarely and unequivocally into the public domain. This is in line with our advocacy efforts at Creative Commons (CC): digital reproductions of public domain material must remain in the public domain. In other words, no new copyright should arise over the creation of a digitized “twin.”