This week, open access advocates in the United States and around the world are rallying around a petition that urges public access to publicly funded research. The petition is now live on Whitehouse.gov’s We the People platform: Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research. We believe in the…

This Saturday is Culture Freedom Day, a worldwide celebration of free and open culture through education efforts, on- and offline events, and promoting artists who work in free culture. Culture Freedom Day is organized by Digital Freedom International, a nonprofit that also promotes software freedom. As stewards of the open licenses and tools that enable…

From 2007 to 2011, COMMUNIA was a project funded by the European Commission to explore the role of the public domain in the digital age. Over four years, COMMUNIA, or The European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain, gathered over 50 members from academia and the CC community to research, promote, and preserve the…

The Saylor Foundation provides global grants of US $20,000 to college textbook authors seeking to openly license their educational textbooks for use in free Saylor college-level courses. Authors maintain their copyright and license textbooks to the world via Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) to enable maximum reuse, remix, and redistribution. To learn more and apply,…

Today is Day Against DRM. If you don’t already, you should know that DRM stands for Digital Rights Management (or probably more accurately, Digital Restrictions Management), and that we have blogged about this day before for good reasons, including, DRM causes problems regarding fair use, lack of competition, privacy and security breaches, forced obsolescence, and…

This year the Content in Context conference (organized by the Association of Education Publishers and the Association of American Publishers School Division) will host a free Metadata Lab centered around educational metadata adoption. The main highlights of the lab: Education data standards overview with Jack Buckley (NCES/CEDS), Ross Santy (US DOE), and Michael Jay (Educational…

Dan bull / Tim Dobson / CC BY-SA Indie musician Dan Bull released “Sharing is Caring” into the public domain using CC0. Recently, “Sharing is Caring” reached #9 on the UK independent chart and #35 on the UK R&B Chart. Creative Commons United Kingdom interviewed Dan about why he chose to release his music for…

Cathy Casserly / Ede & Ravenscroft / CC BY-SA In March, Cathy, our CEO, was recognized for her contributions to open education through an honorary doctorate awarded by The Open University. The Open University is home to the OpenLearn initiative, which makes available over 11,000 hours of structured learning via CC BY-NC-SA and has received…

In March, Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Open Society Institute launched the Why Open Education Matters Video Competition. The goal of the competition is to raise awareness of Open Educational Resources (OER) and solicit short, creative videos that help explain what Open Educational Resources are and how they can be beneficial…

This Saturday’s International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy will unveil a months-long collaborative effort — the Data Journalism Handbook, a free, CC BY-SA licensed book to help journalists find and use data for better news reporting. Data Journalism Handbook – Cover Mockup / jwyg / CC BY-SA A joint initiative of the European Journalism Centre…