Did you know that nearly 800 million adults and young people lack basic literacy skills? Supporting the worldwide teaching of these vital skills will help build a more equal society, but the COVID-19 crisis has disrupted education in nearly every country. We, therefore, face even greater inequalities and a more urgent need to deliver quality…

"Openness and Collaboration" by Paul Downey (CC BY 2.0).

Creative Commons is proud to announce six winning project proposals from the inaugural round of the CC Open Education Platform Activities Fund! The CC Open Education Platform is a vibrant, international network of over 1120 open education advocates, educators, librarians, lawmakers, graduate students, and more, spanning 79 countries. This year, CC launched an activities fund…

A screenshot of the digital collection from the Alliance for Excellent Education.

The Alliance for Excellent Education (All4Ed) just released the second edition of their openly licensed digital image collection, “American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action.” This edition features nearly 500 high-quality images of teachers and students licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). Captured by Allison Shelley (photojournalist; co-founder and co-director of…

Creative Commons provides educators and the expertise they need to harness Open Educational Resources (OER). We strive to make education more accessible to more people around the world. One way we do this is through our CC Certificate training, which is licensed CC BY 4.0 and available for use.  Today, we’re delighted to announce our…

Deeper learning prepares students to apply content knowledge, think critically, and work collaboratively.
Photo by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action

This post was written in collaboration with Jan Gondol, Ebba Ossiannilsson, Karolina Szczepaniak, and Spencer Ellis. A portion was also published on the Open Government Partnership’s website. Currently, we face both a swell of support for open educational resources (OER) and devastating upheaval of our traditional education systems. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, over 1.5 billion…

Astronaut Edwin Aldrin walks on lunar surface near leg of Lunar Module. Credit: Neil Armstrong/NASA, (1969) in the public domain.

It’s July 20, 1969.  Along with 600 million people, nine-year-old Chris Hadfield is glued to his television—watching intently as American astronaut Neil Armstrong glides down the ladder of the Lunar Module, and in one swift pounce, touches the dust of a familiar yet alien world. His words forever immortalized, “That’s one small step for man,…

2020 CC Certificate Scholarship Recipients

The CC Certificate aims to increase our global community’s expertise in open licensing and awareness of our shared, digital commons.  Our first goal is to train at least one person interested in open licensing in every country and territory, around the world. So far, we have CC Certificate graduates from 44 countries and counting! One…

The JOGL team by Thomas Landrain (CC BY).

Thousands of strangers working together, almost entirely online, to effectively solve an urgent, global challenge is remarkable—and it’s happening, right now. Recently, we published a post titled, “Open-Source Medical Hardware: What You Should Know and What You Can Do” examining the collaborative efforts by volunteer groups, universities, and research centers to solve the medical supply…

Image by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images/Images of Empowerment, November 2017 (CC BY-NC)

Since the founding of Creative Commons (CC) in 2001, we’ve been supported by like-minded organizations and individuals who value open access, the open community, and the global commons as much as we do. As we near our 20th anniversary, we are reflecting on the past and planning for the future. What better way to do…

The benefits of open access (OA) are undeniable and increasingly evident across all academic disciplines and scientific research: making academic publications1 freely and openly accessible and reusable provides broad visibility for authors, a better return on investment for funders, and greater access to knowledge for other researchers and the general public. And yet, despite OA’s obvious…