This month, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) shared its new open access policy. This new policy is a welcome initiative that will increase opportunities for the findings of publicly funded research to be accessed, shared and reused. As part of our work supporting efforts in the creation, adoption and implementation of open access policies with…

Dear Mr. President-elect, First, I’d like to offer my sincere congratulations to you and to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. This has been such a difficult year for so many around the world, and in this time of extreme polarization it is encouraging to hear you both talk about bringing people together to meet our common…

Brunch_final by Alexander King (CC BY-SA) derivative of Jan Rombauer's Cheers 2

Generally speaking, 2020 hasn’t been a great year. That’s obvious. But we’re not here to focus on the awful things that have happened (and are still happening) this year. Instead, we’re here to tell you a good news story about 2020: a story about collaboration, innovation, and creativity. A story about the present and the…

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  Modernizing an outdated academic publishing system  Under a traditional publishing model, researchers who want to publish their articles in a journal typically need to assign or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…

It is an honor to be joining the Creative Commons team on the eve of its 20th anniversary year. For nearly two decades, this organization has worked to make the world a more open and equitable place. When CC first launched in 2001, I was a recently-elected Member of the European Parliament at a time…

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,…

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…

At the end of April, CC Search officially celebrated its first birthday! After releasing the search tool last year on April 30, we eagerly watched as it was put to use. Now, with a year behind us and over 2.8 million users across 230 countries and territories, we’re gathering and examining search data to better…

Astronaut Edwin Aldrin walks on lunar surface near leg of Lunar Module. Credit: Neil Armstrong/NASA, (1969) in the public domain.

It’s July 20, 1969.  Along with 600 million people, nine-year-old Chris Hadfield is glued to his television—watching intently as American astronaut Neil Armstrong glides down the ladder of the Lunar Module, and in one swift pounce, touches the dust of a familiar yet alien world. His words forever immortalized, “That’s one small step for man,…

"Sultan Ahmed Mosque" by Konevi (CC0) via Pexels

On the occasion of both Earth Day and World Intellectual Property Day, which this year centers on the theme of Innovation for a Green Future, we’d like to underline the importance of cultural heritage preservation as a response to the threats posed by climate change. In this post, we’ll also share some insights on how…