It’s never easy to say goodbye to someone who has been such a steady and inspiring presence in our community. After almost 15 years of dedicated service, Dr. Cable Green, our Director of Open Education, will be moving on from Creative Commons (CC).  

During his tenure at CC, Cable served as Interim CEO, Director of Open Knowledge, and later returned to his original and most enduring passion – leading CC’s global efforts in open education. For many in both the open education sector and the CC community, Cable needs no introduction. His leadership, vision, and passion for access to knowledge have left an indelible mark on CC and the broader open movement.

A tireless advocate for barrier-free access to information, Cable has been a leading voice on open education worldwide – delivering dozens of keynotes, presentations, and workshops that have inspired educators, policymakers, and learners alike. He is equally celebrated as a generous mentor, offering thoughtful feedback and guidance on open education initiatives across the globe. While his contributions are too numerous to list, one thing is certain: Cable’s unwavering belief in the power of openness to solve the world’s greatest challenges has created lasting, real-world impact.

Over the years, Cable has helped craft numerous government, foundation, and university policies that ensure publicly funded educational resources are freely and openly available to all. Among many examples, he supported the U.S. Department of Labor and 800 community colleges in developing open educational resources (OER) through the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training program.

Cable also co-created cornerstone CC initiatives including the Open Course Library, CC Certificate, CC Consulting Program, Open Education Platform, Institute for Open Leadership, Open Climate Campaign, Open Climate Data Project, and Open Preprints Project – collectively helping raise over $12 million to advance CC’s mission.

A respected collaborator and coalition builder, Cable has worked with partners worldwide to shape the UNESCO Recommendations on OER and Open Science, the Digital Public Goods Standard, Open Up Resources, and the Network of Open Organizations.

“It has been a genuine honor to work alongside an amazing CC team, our global partners, and the open education community to identify complex problems where education is a critical part of the solution, and then opening that knowledge to help solve the problem. Together we’ve saved students billions of dollars, empowered teachers and learners through open pedagogies, and expanded access to education around the world,” shared Cable.

“On behalf of the entire CC community, I want to thank Cable for his dedication to advancing CC’s mission through the power of open education. I count myself among the many colleagues who have had the privilege of learning from his expertise. It’s not often we can so clearly see the global change one person has helped create, but Cable’s legacy in open education is both tangible and enduring,” says Anna Tumadóttir, CEO of Creative Commons. 

Please join us in wishing Cable farewell! Thankfully, as Cable departs for his next adventure, this isn’t goodbye. He will join the CC Advisory Council and be available to CC as needed. To stay connected, you can find him on LinkedIn.

The post A Heartfelt Farewell to Dr. Cable Green appeared first on Creative Commons.

Open Heritage’s Untapped Potential

From sparking creativity to fueling education and scientific research, open heritage generates positive ripple effects across society. Yet, only about 1% of cultural heritage institutions openly share their heritage collections. Incorrect copyright claims over digital reproductions, technological locks, prohibitive access fees, lack of sustainable infrastructure, and inconsistent legal frameworks are just some of the barriers that stand in the way of equitable access to heritage. The result is fragmented and fragile access that prevents people from engaging with heritage, our shared resource. 

A Momentous Contribution to UNESCO’s Efforts

This launch builds on Creative Commons’ long-standing collaboration with UNESCO, as formalized by our recent recognition as an official partner to UNESCO (consultative status). It is also an answer to the call made by UNESCO at MONDIACULT 2025 — the world’s largest conference on cultural policies — for culture to be treated as a global priority amid mounting geopolitical divides and multiple crises.

Why Sign the Statement?

Signing the Open Heritage Statement is more than symbolic; it is a way for signatories to demonstrate shared commitment, signal broad sectoral consensus to policymakers, and strengthen a global, community-driven movement. Each signature helps build momentum toward an international framework to ensure equitable access to heritage in the digital environment.

Open Heritage Statement Launch Webinar

Creative Commons will host a webinar to mark the launch of the Statement and brief participants on its objectives, impact, and opportunities for engagement. 

Date: 14 October 2025
Time: 14:00 UTC
Register here 

Take Action

By signing the Open Heritage Statement today, you add your voice to a global call for equitable access to heritage, helping to lower barriers, stimulate creativity, and preserve our cultural memory for future generations.

Learn more about the Open Heritage Statement.

The post Global Call to Action: Open Heritage Statement Now Open for Signature appeared first on Creative Commons.

The (Under-Realized) Potential of Open Heritage

To understand our present, we need to know our past: our memories, our history, our heritage. Over the last two decades, pioneers of open heritage — institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Rijksmuseum, Paris Musées, the Smithsonian, and many more — have shown the world the value of sharing digitized public domain collections openly. Taken together, these successes give us a glimpse of what is possible, from sparking new narratives across diverse contexts, nurturing collective memory, advancing digital equity, and inviting people to transform yesterday’s heritage into today’s creativity and tomorrow’s innovation. Their leadership inspired a vision: a future where the world’s heritage is equitably accessible by everyone. 

But these success stories of open heritage remain the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of CHIs still face serious obstacles to openly sharing their digital collections and lack the support to open up confidently, be it in Chile, India, Nigeria, or Brazil. Legal uncertainty leading to copyright “anxiety,” fear of lost revenue, resource constraints, economic questions around open licensing, and misconceptions about what “open” really means continue to hold many back. Above all, the absence of international guidance encouraging open policies, tools, and practices puts our shared heritage at risk of being locked away forever. The result is a fragmented global landscape with pockets of equitable access within vast stretches of inaccessibility.

The numbers speak for themselves. The Open GLAM Survey, which has gathered data from nearly 1,700 CHIs across 55 countries, documents close to 100 million openly licensed or public domain digital objects. This reflects the fact that only ~1% of the world’s CHIs have open policies. 

The potential of open heritage is enormous, but without a shared international normative framework to support CHIs in going open, this potential will remain unrealized. The need for alignment, across regions, institutions, and states, is urgent.

From Vision to Coalition — A Brief History of TAROCH

Recognizing this gap, CC began convening the global open culture community around a simple but powerful belief: when people can equitably connect with heritage in the digital environment, they can learn from it, build upon it, and keep it alive for future generations. With support from the Arcadia Fund starting in 2021, we published An Agenda for Copyright Reform (2022) and a Call to Action to Policymakers. We organized a Roundtable in Lisbon (2023) to assess global challenges and explore the need for a new UNESCO instrument for open culture. The turning point came in Lisbon in May 2024. Nearly 50 experts, activists, and institutional leaders gathered for the Open Culture Strategic Workshop and together charted a new path toward the official launch of the TAROCH Coalition in November 2024. 

TAROCH is now an international coalition of more than 60 organizations across 25 countries. Membership is extensive and diverse, reflecting the global nature of this endeavor. Through international working groups and local advocacy circles, Coalition members collaborate on targeted policy engagement to empower CHIs with shared open standards and clear opportunities for international cooperation.

The Opportunity of a UNESCO Partnership

In August 2025, CC became an official UNESCO partner, a formal recognition of the track record of collaboration between the two organizations over two decades in the fields of openness and education, science, culture, and communication. Now more than ever, CC, TAROCH, and UNESCO are uniquely positioned to set open standards at the international level. In fact, UNESCO has demonstrated a strong commitment to openness through multiple instruments, notably the 2019 Recommendation on Open Educational Resources and the 2021 Recommendation on Open Science. By 2023, 61 Member States had implemented the OER Recommendation, and the number of countries with open science policies had almost doubled. The evidence is in plain sight: UNESCO Recommendations lead to positive change. 

A Recommendation on Open Heritage, or other standard-setting instrument, would be the next logical step, complementing the existing instruments and catalyzing global cooperation on a key priority for UNESCO: ensuring equitable access to heritage in the digital environment to activate the universal right to participate in cultural life. 

What’s Next? Introducing the Open Heritage Statement

Over the past months, the TAROCH Coalition has collaboratively drafted the Open Heritage Statement, turning local efforts into a global call. The Statement is a shared articulation of values, challenges, and priorities to close the global gap in access to heritage. It consists of two parts: a Preamble, situating the issues in context and outlining values and principles; and Articles, proposing policy solutions to lower barriers and unlock the potential of open heritage.

In October, we will publish the Open Heritage Statement and invite governments, institutions, organizations, policymakers, and advocates to sign or support the Statement. By joining our voices under the banner of the Open Heritage Statement, we can raise awareness about the importance of open heritage as a key means to turn the vision of the 2022 Mondiacult Declaration of culture as a global public good into action. 

The Statement will be launched publicly during a Creative Commons webinar on Tuesday, 14 October at 14:00 UTC. Register today. 

If your institution or organization would like to be part of a global movement that is helping shape the future of open heritage, apply to join the TAROCH Coalition.

The post From Shared Vision to Global Action: Paving the Road to the Open Heritage Statement appeared first on Creative Commons.

Why Zulip?

• Aligned values: The Zulip project values resonate with Creative Commons’ commitments to openness, transparency, and community-driven spaces.
• Better features for collaboration: Zulip offers a broad set of tools that make it easier to coordinate across time zones and languages. Its powerful threading system is especially suited to global, distributed communities.
• Stronger permissions: Zulip provides more flexible roles and permissions, which will allow for better community moderation. 

What This Means for You

Moving to Zulip is not just a platform change—we are also taking this opportunity to strengthen our outreach and engagement process. We’d like to warmly invite everyone who sees themselves as part of the CC global community to join us on Zulip. This is the first step in fostering broader community collaboration within all of CC’s community spaces. 

Join now! To join CC on Zulip , please complete the Creative Commons Community Intake Form. This form will help us ensure a safe, transparent, and welcoming environment.

How the Process Works

Step 1 – Request
When you fill out the Creative Commons Community Intake Form, you’ll be asked to:

• Verify you’re a real human
• Confirm your interest/engagement in the open movement
• Agree to CC’s Code of Conduct
• You may also choose to opt in to our community mailing list.

Step 2 – Review

• Applications will be reviewed by the CC team to ensure they meet the above criteria.
• Approved applicants will be added to our community list, Zulip (if requested), and the mailing lists (if requested).
• Applications that don’t meet the criteria will not be approved.

Transitioning from Slack to Zulip

As we transition away from Slack, we hope that any active Slack users will join us in moving over to Zulip, and we can engage new audiences on this platform. 

Timeline

• Week of Sept 15: Announce migration to Zulip
  • people are able to join Zulip
  • Slack signup closed and redirected to Zulip signup
• Weeks of Sept 22 – Oct 6: Weekly reminders
• Oct 17: Slack is shutdown

What’s Next

As we’ve been discussing on the blog,  the current Creative Commons Global Network (CCGN) membership process has been dormant for a number of years. We want to ensure that our community spaces are welcoming to everyone who sees themselves as part of the CC global community, regardless of existing CCGN membership. This is the first step of many!

We’re excited to take this step together. Zulip will give us a sustainable, values-aligned space to connect, collaborate, and grow as a community. If you are new to Zulip, you can get started with this helpful beginners guide. 

Join Zulip now and share what you’ve been working on in the open movement! 

The post New Community Chat Platform: Moving from Slack to Zulip appeared first on Creative Commons.

Open Heritage and Contemporary Creativity

Apollo or Venus in your living room? This is the proposition made by Denmark’s Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK) upon openly sharing its vast collection of 3D models of sculptures. With SMK’s open files of digital reproductions of sculptures in the public domain, anyone can 3D-print a sculpture of Roman gods Apollo or Venus and use it to create a new object to decorate the living room, among many creative endeavors.

In this blog post, we highlight some examples of the benefits of open heritage and show what becomes possible when barriers are removed and heritage in the public domain is openly accessible.

When cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) like the SMK openly share their public domain collections in the digital environment, their mission to make heritage available to all really comes alive. Open heritage can prompt curiosity, unlock creativity, spark imagination, spur artistic experimentation, and nurture the contemporary art scene. It allows artists, creators, designers and creative entrepreneurs to have a fresh take on our shared heritage. Open heritage is essential if we want people to be able to interrogate humanity’s cultural record, participate in cultural life, and enjoy the arts without barriers and on equitable terms.

Europeana’s GIF IT UP annual competition is another great example of creative remixing and storytelling made possible by open heritage. Every year in October, people from around the globe create new GIFs from openly licensed heritage material and share them with the world.

 

It is also fascinating to see artist Amy Karle leveraging Smithsonian 3D scans of a fossilized Triceratops skeleton (the first “digital dinosaur”) to create sculptures consisting of “novel evolutionary forms based upon extinct species to explore hypothetical evolutions through technological regeneration.” And for the romantics among us, Germany’s Coding da Vinci produced a playful “dating app” matching users with portrait paintings digitized by the Augustinermuseum (Städtische Museen Freiburg).

Open Heritage’s Ripple Effect Across Society

Increased creativity is not the only benefit of open heritage. In particular, open heritage can also contribute to heritage preservation and increased visibility. For example, in 2021, the Wellcome Collection in the UK announced its images had passed 1.5 billion views on Wikipedia. Open heritage also helps enhance student engagement and learning: the Wikipedia in School project in Denmark integrated open heritage resources directly into school curricula, making education more interactive and culturally relevant. It can also accelerate scientific research, in particular to address global challenges like climate change. Indeed, CHIs can amplify the scientific value of their heritage collection and foster cross-border collaboration among researchers. The butterfly story mentioned in part 1 of this series is a clear illustration of the values of open heritage for scientific progress. 

From advancing cultural rights and digital equity, to fueling education and scientific research and discovery, open heritage generates ripple effects across society. And as the world faces multiple challenges, open heritage is all the more critical if we want to sustain resilient, free and democratic societies, strengthen fundamental freedoms, and foster the production of new solutions to the world’s biggest problems. 

However, as we explored in part 1 of this series, so much of our shared digital heritage remains locked away, despite the fact that heritage in the public domain belongs to the public, and should be free for anyone to access, reuse, and breathe new life into it. Equitable access to heritage is not just a means to enjoy culture as a global public good; it is also a social and economic imperative. 

A Global Call for Open Heritage

To support open heritage at scale and protect access to public domain heritage for future generations, we need global alignment. This October, the TAROCH Coalition (Towards a Recommendation on Open Cultural Heritage) will publish the Open Heritage Statement, a collaborative declaration that sets out shared values, challenges, and priorities for closing the global gap in equitable access to heritage. The Statement will enshrine the principles that underpin equitable access and identify concrete actions to lower barriers, enabling open heritage to nurture creativity and shape sustainable futures for all. The Statement is designed to support UNESCO’s ongoing work on cultural rights, digital transformation, and knowledge sharing for sustainable development, reinforcing its founding commitment to the free flow of ideas.

Register today for the launch of the Open Heritage Statement on 14 October, 14:00 UTC to learn more about our global call for equitable access to public domain heritage in the digital environment. Once released, the Statement will be made available for governments, institutions and organizations to sign and promote, laying the groundwork for a future international framework on open heritage.

What is “Openness” in the Context of Heritage?

Openness entered the world of heritage in the early 2000s. Open access in the context of heritage materials means heritage (and associated metadata) is as broadly accessible as possible and it is shared and reused (including commercial use and modification) by anyone for any purpose, at no cost to the user and free from unnecessary copyright restrictions.

Open heritage is achieved by leveraging the vast potential of digital tools and technologies in enhancing access, protecting the public domain from erosion, and encouraging the use of open licenses and tools, such as Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools, to clearly communicate how heritage materials can be accessed and reused. A central tenet is that faithful digital reproductions of public domain materials must stay in the public domain. The Małopolska Virtual Museums in Poland exemplify this principle: “We wish that the Resources which are in the public domain be publicly available to the whole of society, free of charge, in high definition, without watermarks and other technical restrictions (…). Resources that are in the public domain still belong to it after they have been digitized.”

It’s important to note that openness is relative, nuanced and contextual. Open heritage does not aim to force access to heritage that was never meant by its community holders or traditional custodians to be shared, let alone openly shared.

Openness is a means to an end, and not an end in and of itself. It is a means to remove unfair barriers to access and use of heritage, so people can equitably connect and engage with heritage in the digital environment and together build and sustain a thriving commons. It is a pathway to achieve heritage-related goals, such as preservation, safeguarding, transmission, access, representation, and participation.

There are also legal and ethical factors to consider when making heritage open: data protection (protection of personal or confidential information), privacy, and cultural sensitivities around heritage, among others, as well as respect for Indigenous heritage and Traditional Knowledge. In sum, there may be legitimate reasons not to openly share heritage.

This blog post is an adaptation of this pre-print manuscript, where you can discover many more examples of the benefits made possible by open heritage.

 

Jamie Seaboch / EyeQ Innovations, digital collage CC-BY-SA 4.0. Based on Niels Hansen Jacobsen, Motif from “The Story of a Mother”, 1892, KMS5387; August Strindberg, “Storm in the Skerries, ‘The Flying Dutchman’”,1892, KMS3432; Vilhelm Hammershøi, “Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor”, 1901, KMS 3693. Statens Museum for Kunst, open.smk.dk, Public Domain.

GIF by Francesco Trentadue (Valenzano, Italy). Based on “Wasserfall“ by Franz Rechberger. Public Domain. Albertina Museum, via Europeana.

The post The Benefits of Open Heritage in the Digital Environment appeared first on Creative Commons.