Credit: 2010 PopTech Science and Public Leadership Fellows by PopTech (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Last month, cOAlition S released its Rights Retention Strategy to safeguard researchers’ intellectual ownership rights and suppress unreasonable embargo periods—Creative Commons (CC) keenly supports this initiative.  Modernizing an outdated academic publishing system  Under a traditional publishing model, researchers who want to publish their articles in a journal typically need to assign or exclusively license their…

5169051592_632fc3cc6b_h Kollage Kid (CC BY-NC-SA)

Over 300 million images are uploaded to Facebook a day. Yes, just Facebook. Once other social media and photo-sharing platforms like Flickr, Unsplash, Instagram, etc. are taken into account, that number quickly grows into the billions.  A lot has changed since the dawn of photography in the 19th century—when Nicéphore Niépce (a.k.a. the “Father of…

La Donna Della Finestra, 1881 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti via Birmingham Museums Trust (CC0)

The following is a summary of “GLAM Collections on Social Media: Navigating Copyright Questions—a conversation with Aleksandra Strzelichowska, Mikka Gee Conway and Anne Young” published on 31 May 2020 by Scann (licensed CC BY).  How often do you debate whether to share an openly licensed work on social media? If you do share a work,…

Over the weekend, news emerged that upset even the most ardent skeptics of open access. Under the headline, “Trump vs Berlin” the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported that President Trump offered $1 billion USD to the German biopharmaceutical company CureVac to secure their COVID-19 vaccine “only for the United States.” In response, Jens Spahn, the…

"Bhavna Ben Ramesh" by Paul Bronstein (2015), CC BY-NC.

Storytelling is a powerful tool because it can change perceptions and inspire action—and images are an essential component. As Depression-era American photojournalist and documentarian Dorothea Lange said, “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”  Unfortunately, finding high-quality and diverse openly licensed images, particularly those of women, is a…

Despite our best efforts, occasionally there are issues and/or errors in the published legal code for CC legal tools. CC is committed to maintaining static, canonical versions of its legal tools, so we do not make changes to the legal code after it is published. Therefore, when issues or errors are identified, they are documented…

Photo Credit: Ryan Merkley, CC BY 4.0 Many friends from the CC and open education communities have noticed my absence from meetings and conferences in the past six months. I’m ready to share why. I was diagnosed with an auto-immune liver disease in 2005, and with liver cancer in September, 2018. The cancer was caused…

Majd Al-shihabi, the inaugural Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellow, is a Palestinian-Syrian systems design engineer focusing on the role of technology in urban systems and policy design. He is passionate about development, access to knowledge, user centered design, and the internet, and experiments with implementing tools and infrastructures that catalyze social change. He studied engineering at…

Majd Al-shihabi, the inaugural Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellow, is a Palestinian-Syrian systems design engineer focusing on the role of technology in urban systems and policy design. He is passionate about development, access to knowledge, user centered design, and the internet, and experiments with implementing tools and infrastructures that catalyze social change. He studied engineering at…

In January, Creative Commons kicked off an exciting new initiative called CC usability with two primary goals: