The keys to an elegant set of open licenses are simplicity and interoperability. CC licenses are widely recognized as the standard in the open access publishing community, but a major trade association recently published a new set of licenses and is urging its members to adopt it. We believe that the new licenses could introduce…

Creative Commons leaflet / Sviatlana Yermakovich / CC BY-SA Creative Commons is happy to announce the launch of CC Belarus. Youth organization Falanster is now the belarusian Creative Commons affiliate team! On August 29, the official launch of CC Belarus will take place in Minsk. For now, CC Belarus will focus on the following topics:…

(SOO logo here. Earth icon licensed CC BY by Erin Standley from the Noun Project.) After months of discussions, deliberations, and planning between CC staff, African Regional Coordinators, African Affiliate teams, and others in the open space, Creative Commons Africa is set to storm Africa by having a continent-wide launch for School of Open in…

Girl in white kimono, George Hendrik Breitner, 1894; CC0 Yesterday Europeana published a great case study documenting the experiences of the Dutch Rijksmuseum in opening up access to their collection of digital public domain images. The case study was written by Joris Pekel, community coordinator for cultural heritage at the Europeana Foundation. Over the last…

Project 365 #303: 301009 Blink And You’ll Miss It! / Pete / CC BY Another run of School of Open courses is starting up in August, September and October! The first course to kick things off is a second iteration of “Why Open?” “Why Open?” was collaboratively developed and facilitated one year ago in August…

Today the European Commission released licensing recommendations to support the reuse of public sector information in Europe. In addition to providing guidance on baseline license principles for public sector content and data, the guidelines suggest that Member States should adopt standardized open licenses – such as Creative Commons licenses: Several licences that comply with the…

WikiProject Open is an online School of Open training program for new and seasoned Wikipedia volunteers to collaborate on improving Wikipedia articles related to openness. The aim of the project is two-fold: in addition to improving Wikipedia articles related to openness (such as open access publishing and open educational resources), volunteers seek to improve Wikimedia…

CC is supporting the Bouchout Declration for Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management by becoming a signatory. The Declaration’s objective is to help make biodiversity data openly available to everyone around the world. It offers the biodiversity community a way to demonstrate their commitment to open science, one of the fundamental components of CC’s vision for an…

EFF / CC BY Today, Creative Commons and over 35 other organizations published an open letter urging negotiators of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to rescind a proposal to extend copyright terms by another 20 years beyond its current, mandatory term. This week, 12 Pacific rim countries are meeting in Ottawa, Canada, to continue secret negotiations…

Today, we’re excited to launch our new annual report, The future is open. In this report, you’ll learn about: Why the 4.0 CC licenses were a truly global effort. The astounding community-building work that CC affiliates are doing all over the world. Our work in open policy and support for global copyright reform. How software…