You’ve heard the stories: engineers 3D printing face shields in their basements; do-it-yourself hobbyists sewing face masks; and fashion designers crafting personal protection gowns. Globally, people are trying to help fill the medical supply gap caused by the COVID-19 pandemic through open-source medical hardware. It’s a heartwarming display of global ingenuity, innovation, and collaboration. In this…
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…
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 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…
We’re excited to announce that the Call for Proposals and Scholarship Applications for the 2020 CC Global Summit is now open! The 2020 CC Global Summit, held May 14-16 in Lisbon, Portugal, gathers those in the open community under the umbrella of learning, sharing, and creating; united by a passion for growing a vibrant, usable commons…
Creative Commons is pleased to be a part of the second annual Public Domain Day (PDD) celebration held in Washington D.C. on January 30, in collaboration with the Internet Archive, the Institute for Intellectual Property & Social Justice, the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, and SPARC. In order to celebrate the public domain…
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Victoria HeathOpen CultureA portrait of Caroline Rémy (1855-1929), a French feminist journalist. Photo by Paul Cardon.
The Paris Musées’ recently released more than 100,000 works under Creative Commons Zero (CCØ), putting the works into the public domain. They also released their collections’ Application Programming Interface (API), allowing users to “recover, in high definition, several royalty-free images and their records from cross-searches on the works.” Users can scroll through the collection via…
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Anna TumadóttirAbout CCAbove is a screenshot of the students’ proposed prototype for an improved CC Search. (CC BY)
Since its launch, CC Search has become more than just a search tool for CC-licensed content; it has come to exemplify the virtuous cycle of knowledge creation—where we create, collaborate, and learn from one another. Our recent collaboration with a group of students from UC Berkeley was a true exercise in this cycle of creation…
In 2017, CC published Made with Creative Commons, a book examining 24 different business models built around CC licenses and CC-licensed content. Financially supported by more than 1600 backers on Kickstarter, the project itself is an example of how openly licensed work can be funded and how CC-licensed content can evolve over time. After publishing…
