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…

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…

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…

The global health crisis is crystalizing the need for policies that support universal access to learning resources. The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on over a billion learners’ lives—half of the world’s student population have seen their schools or universities close to slow the spread of the virus. As a result, many educational institutions are…

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…

Creative Commons regularly works with governments, foundations, and other institutions worldwide to help them create, adopt, and implement open licensing policies. These policies typically require grant recipients to openly license and freely share the work they create with grant funds. We do this to ensure publicly (and privately) funded works are openly licensed and freely…

Update: On February 7, 2020, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied Great Minds’ petition for rehearing (opinion (PDF)). As a result, the decision (PDF) of the panel in favor of CC’s interpretation of the licenses remains final. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reaffirmed Creative Commons’ interpretation of activities that are permissible under the…