Posts by Victoria Heath
In response to the global health emergency caused by COVID-19, we’ve seen an array of organizations, publications, and governments make COVID-19 related research open access. For example, the U.S. National Library of Medicine recently released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19)—a machine-readable coronavirus literature collection with over 29,000 articles available for text and data mining…
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…
Over the last few days, a growing number of organizations have shut down their offices and told employees to work from home in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Here at Creative Commons (CC), we’ve also taken necessary precautions such as postponing all work-related travel and canceling the in-person component of the annual CC…
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…
The Smithsonian—the world’s largest museum and research institution—announced yesterday Smithsonian Open Access, an initiative that removes copyright restrictions from 2.8 million digital collection 2D and 3D images and nearly two centuries of data. This major initiative uses CC0—Creative Commons’ public domain dedication tool—to make millions of images and data freely available to the public. “Our…
