In February, we hosted a webinar in our Open Culture Live series titled “Maximizing the Value(s) of Open Access in Cultural Heritage Institutions.” In this blog post, we summarize the key points raised in the discussion and share a link to the recording.

Webinar highlights

One of the most common concerns we hear about the decision to go open is the impact on an institution’s revenue through selling licensed images. With this webinar, we aimed to shed light on those concerns and imagine alternative models that both support openness to collections  while preserving institutions’ financial sustainability.

Panelists generally spoke about how the values and benefits of going open far exceed any potential loss of income. They also pointed out that cultural heritage institutions that go open get much better visibility and outreach online, thereby becoming a trusted source for information and images of their collections. This triggers new interactions with collections, fostering inclusive engagement and new forms of storytelling that are respectful of source communities. This in turn might lead to more onsite visits, increasing ticket sales.

Watch the recording.

Kicking off the conversation, Kristofer Erickson, Professor of Social Data Science at the University of Glasgow, offered evidence of the increased distribution of openly licensed images — with an estimation that if one assigned a commercial license rate to all 50 million files on Wikimedia Commons, the downstream economic value would equal about 22.5 billion US dollars. He said: “there’s a tremendous amount of value in free and open license materials both from cultural heritage institutions and from other informal, volunteer collective projects. And the challenge is making that material available and unlocking it so that it can be used by downstream users of all types.” He also emphasized the multiple layers of downstream uses and the positive spillovers that might be indirect but eventually link back to institutions.

Next to take the floor was Giovana Fontanelle, Program Officer, Culture and Heritage at Wikimedia Foundation. She presented data showing the comparison of page views to artworks at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts between the Met’s website and the Wikipedia articles in English and in all languages. Later in the conversation, she asked “does the sharing of culture, heritage images on social media, for example, cause negative financial, commercial and economic impacts for institutions? I believe that in 2024 most organizations right now understand that sharing their files on closed platforms doesn’t bring their financials down but actually helps to improve it in other ways down the line.”

We then heard from Elliott Bledsoe, Co-Lead of Creative Commons Australia and Wikimedia Australia Committee Member, who brought up the issue of the costs of digitization, and suggested considering a different approach: “We strive to make as much of our collection available to the public in a digital format online as we can, bearing in mind that there are reasons why we can’t make everything accessible, such as privacy or indigenous cultural, intellectual property, or other types of considerations. But if we take as a baseline that institutions want to make as much of their material accessible as possible, you can frame the idea of trying to get material digitized rather than being a transactional thing, a way of jumping the queue.” In this model, users would pay for the first instance of digitization of cultural heritage materials, which could then be made freely available online. In that new framing, payment would form part of a much bigger process: not as a condition for access, but as a contribution to supporting general access to cultural heritage for all.

Last but not least, Douglas McCarthy, Open GLAM Researcher and Author, critiqued institutions who choose to charge for image licenses with the headline that: “hardly any institutions actually turn a profit from that model. So the model of licensing content, asserting copyright or using contract law to control and attempt to monetize digital collections, was a bit more successful, slightly healthier, 20 years ago when I started in this area. That really isn’t the case now. Very rarely will you see a number in the black rather than the red, profit being returned from the classic picture library model, if we can call it that today.”

The discussion also touched upon alternative models for generating revenue which are not all-or-nothing, including charging for the first instance of digitization of a given work, which can then be shared publicly, as mentioned above, as well as a pay-what-you-can model. With equity at the center of many institutions’ missions in 2024, open access helps to ensure that audiences around the world can find and use cultural heritage that belongs to the public. Furthermore, open access creates more digital pathways back to the museum, leading to more financial stability through opportunities like partnerships as well as enhanced reputation through increased citations in academic papers. Other key takeaways included exposing and needing to escape the false binary of “free” versus “paying,” and uncovering the opportunity cost of not making collections freely and openly accessible: when collections are held behind (pay)walls, part of an institution’s impact and influence vanishes.

Thank you to the experts who joined us and shared their thoughts and research.

Learn More

During the webinar, panelists and participants shared some relevant resources.

• With Enough Eyeballs All Searches Are Diligent: Mobilizing the Crowd in Copyright Clearance for Mass Digitization
• We digitize the documents you order – the trial of digital delivery started in Jyväskylä (Finnish) Digitoimme tilaamasi asiakirjat – digitaalisen toimittamisen kokeilu käynnistyi Jyväskylässä | Kansallisarkisto
• The Public Domain needs preserving and digitising
• Open access arrives at the Cleveland Museum of Art | Europeana PRO
• UK Court Clears Path for Open Culture to Flourish – Creative Commons
• Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online
• Working with open licences: A guide for projects
• Museums in the Digital Age: Opening up at Birmingham Museums Trust | Europeana PRO
• The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam Has Digitized 709,000 Works of Art, Including Famous Works by Rembrandt and Vermeer | Open Culture
• Making the case for impact at SMK | Europeana PRO

What is Open Culture Live?

In this series, we tackle some of the more complex challenges that face the open culture movement, bringing in speakers with personal and professional expertise on the topic.

• Back to Basics: Open Culture for Beginners 
• Respectful Terminologies & Changing the Subject 
• Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution

CC is a non-profit that relies on contributions to sustain our work. Support CC in our efforts to promote better sharing at creativecommons.org/donate.

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Today, Creative Commons (CC) joins the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) as a new member. The DPGA is a multi-stakeholder initiative with a mission to accelerate the attainment of the sustainable development goals in low- and middle-income countries by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods (DPGs).

“We are thrilled to welcome Creative Commons to the Digital Public Goods Alliance. Their licenses and legal tools are pivotal for enhancing the sharing of DPGs, enabling more open, accessible tools to tackle global challenges. Similarly, Creative Commons’ commitment to training and capacity building supports governments and institutions in adopting open policies and practices, enriching the DPG ecosystem and equipping advocates with the needed knowledge. Their Open Climate Campaign and Open Climate Data project, is a testament to the power of open access in addressing critical issues like the climate crisis and biodiversity preservation. Together, we look forward to making significant strides towards a more open and sustainable world.” – Liv Marte Nordhaug, Chief Executive Officer, DPGA Secretariat

CC is delighted to be contributing to this mission. Solving the world’s most pressing challenges requires the open licensing and sharing of digital knowledge and cultural heritage assets about those challenges. By advocating for the use and implementation of DPGs, global communities can work together in prioritizing and mobilizing resources to help solve these challenges. CC’s legal tools and our programs play a critical role in helping to achieve the DPGA’s mission and advance the DPG ecosystem overall.

CC’s work aligns with that of the DPGA in the following ways, which will be included as part of the DPGA’s Annual Roadmap. CC will:

• Enable the sharing and use of DPGs via International Creative Commons Licenses and Public Domain Tools. CC provides and stewards the CC licenses and public domain (PD) tools that give every person and organization in the world a free, simple, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works; ensure proper attribution; and enable others to copy, distribute, and make use of those works. CC legal tools are the digital public infrastructure that make better sharing of DPGs possible.
• Open Up Knowledge and Culture to Help Solve the World’s Most Pressing Problems. In 2024, the Open Climate Campaign will advance open access to climate research to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity. We are also looking to open educational resources about climate change for everyone to learn, discover, and contribute. A parallel project on Open Climate Data will help facilitate the opening and sharing of climate datasets and data models to spur additional research and learning. And as cultural heritage is directly at risk of irremediable loss due to climate change, open access to cultural heritage helps put scientific, historical, and socio-cultural knowledge into context and fosters the creation of new knowledge. With open culture, we can raise awareness about SDGs, using cultural heritage as a medium, and empower people with the knowledge to collaborate on a global scale to solve the world’s most pressing problems.
• Provide Commons Training and Consulting. CC offers the public a variety of training, including regular CC Certificate courses (in-depth courses for people interested in becoming experts in creating and engaging with openly licensed works), office hours with our legal team, as well as customized consulting and facilitation. Through our consulting, we help governments and institutions develop and implement open policies, work toward greater open practices, build capacity in open licensing, and connect with open advocates to promote the creation and sharing of openly licensed DPGs.

For us, being a member means working with other DPGA members and CC’s extensive member network to build capacity, develop practical solutions, and advocate for better open sharing of knowledge and culture that serves the public interest. When the world uses CC legal tools to share their knowledge, everyone has access to DPGs including: open educational resources, open access research, open cultural heritage assets, open data, and AI algorithms and models.

For any inquiries on Creative Commons please reach out to Cable Green: Director of Open Knowledge. For more information on the Digital Public Goods Alliance please reach out to hello@digitalpublicgoods.net

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Greetings to the CC Community!

A lot of exciting and critical work awaits us in 2024. While I steer Creative Commons as interim CEO, I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and share details of our key priorities in the upcoming year.

I joined Creative Commons in late September 2019 as Director of Product and partnered with our former Director of Engineering, Kriti Godey, to lead our work on building CC Search. That project was transitioned to OpenVerse, stewarded by the WordPress Foundation, and subsequently I stepped into the role of COO. My background and education have spanned multiple continents and very different spaces (non-profit, start-ups, higher education) but have consistently come back to a theme, from the micro to the macro level: How do we remove barriers? How do we make things work better?

It is a privilege to work at Creative Commons, where the organizational mission so deeply aligns with my own belief system. We cannot hope to work together — within our homes or workplaces, across organizational and cultural boundaries – if we are not able to share knowledge and are not willing to learn from one another.

As I navigate the role of interim CEO, with the support and collaboration of the CC Board of Directors, it is clear where we need to deepen our commitments. We have important work taking place in the fields of Open Culture and Open Science. There are also critical considerations to navigate due to the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and the impact this may have on knowledge sharing and the broader commons. All of this work is rooted in our role as the stewards of the legal infrastructure of the open web.

Key Program Updates 

As many in our community know, in the past three years, we’ve had the good fortune of launching four major projects: our Open Culture program, the Open Climate Campaign, our Open Climate Data project, and a project to openly license preprints.

Our Open Culture program, launched in mid-2021, is focused on developing an open culture ecosystem amongst cultural heritage institutions. These include both the institutions themselves – including galleries, libraries, archives, and museums – as well as their users. The mission of cultural heritage institutions aligns with the work of Creative Commons. Our vision is a world where knowledge and culture are equitably shared in ways that serve the public interest. We want the institutions we work with to be better equipped to openly share the content they stewards. Through work in policy and advocacy, infrastructure support, and capacity and community building, the end goal is for the public to have increased, equitable, and ethical access to knowledge and culture. Interested advocates can get involved through the Open Culture Platform. This work is supported by a multi-year gift from Arcadia, and will continue until at least mid-2026.

In mid-2022 we launched the Open Climate Campaign, in partnership with SPARC and EIFL, with support from Open Society Foundations and Arcadia. This four-year campaign has the goal of making the open sharing of research the norm in climate science. The climate crisis is the defining existential crisis of our time, and we cannot hope to collaborate on solutions, or preserve global biodiversity, if the knowledge about this global challenge is not open and accessible to all.

To complement our work on open sharing of research, we were thrilled to receive support for our Open Climate Data project, from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, dedicated to the opening and sharing of large climate datasets and climate data models across the globe. For anyone working to understand and address climate change, the certainty of what they’re allowed to do with climate data is critical to knowledge advancement. We recently shared recommended best practices for better sharing of climate data and are hopeful this work can continue.

To better facilitate knowledge sharing, we most recently launched a collaborative project supported by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative to help make openly licensed preprints the primary vehicle of scientific dissemination, with a focus on the life sciences. Learning from the potential of rapid response and open sharing to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, we are grateful to contribute to strengthening the ecosystem of scholarly communication.

It is imperative that we continue our strategic interventions in cultural heritage, climate science, and the life sciences. All of this work is fully in line with our organizational strategy, in particular our emphasis on transforming institutions to make knowledge and cultural heritage assets as openly accessible as possible. 

Generative AI & the Commons

Over the last year we have been asking ourselves what is the appropriate role, exactly, for CC, when it comes to generative AI – apart from the ongoing and widespread use of CC licenses for software documentation and in open source AI communities. Throughout 2023, we ran community consultations. We met directly with hundreds of community members, brought together different groups in small workshops, intimate roundtables, community conferences (such as MozFest), and public events (such as our symposium on Generative AI & Creativity) to debate copyright law, the ethics of open sharing, and other relevant areas that touch on AI. Our consultations spanned the globe and culminated in the CC Global Summit in October, where the central theme was the impact of AI on the Commons. A set of community-driven principles on AI continue to inform the organization’s thinking as we plan for the year ahead.

We will continue the critically important work of bringing together diverse viewpoints to explore the broad topics of generative AI (inputs, outputs, copyright, choice, provenance, authenticity, compensation, and such). In parallel, we are identifying areas where Creative Commons can play a role and explore community-oriented contributions to the broader ecosystem. This may be through experiments in preference signaling, going back to the fundamentals of the commons and celebrating creativity, or seeing what the implications are of “open” models training on “open” content. (That’s right, we also need to better define “openness” when it comes to artificial intelligence.)

Supporting our Open Infrastructure

Our work is not only focused on particular sectors or policy interventions. We need to actively steward our legal tools and any necessary innovations that help us achieve our mission, to empower individuals and communities by equipping them with technical, legal, and policy solutions to enable sharing of knowledge and culture in the public interest.

Underpinning all of our work as an organization, and much of the work of our community, is the legal infrastructure that powers open sharing, and it needs, for lack of a better metaphor, care and feeding:

• We need to ensure that the legal tools are translated into as many languages as possible to make open sharing more equitable across the world.
• We need to ensure that when someone brings a nuanced question to the organization that we continue to have expert lawyers and open access advocates on staff to help answer those questions.
• We need to ensure the basic technology is maintained, and when needed, modernized.
• It is critical that we continue to generate educational materials, and train future generations of open access advocates, whether they work in libraries, cultural heritage, education, or beyond.
• We need to find ways to better support our community, including the CC Global Network, with an emphasis on hearing and amplifying the viewpoints of community members in the Global South.

With this in mind, we launched our Open Infrastructure Circle, and are grateful to those individuals and institutions who signed on early to show a commitment to the underlying legal infrastructure that powers open sharing on the web. This will be a central focus in 2024 to help guarantee more predictable support for the legal infrastructure that is CC’s reason for being.

And finally, thank you again to our community, our Global Network members, and all of our supporters, for helping to sustain the organization for future decades and supporting a thriving digital commons. We could not do all of this without you. My (virtual) door is always open to CC friends and new ideas. I firmly believe we can continue to reduce barriers to sharing and cultivate a commons while empowering creators to make the right choices for them.

The post What Lies Ahead in 2024 appeared first on Creative Commons.

We are delighted to share the latest version of our Creative Commons Certificate Course content, available on our Certificates website as an OER (open educational resource) in multiple formats.

The Creative Commons Certificate program launched in 2018 to strengthen our global communities’ efforts to share open knowledge and culture. To date, we have over 1700 graduates of the Certificate program from 65 different countries. 

The program was built for iteration and adaptation.  We regularly revise and update the CC Certificate materials based on direct feedback from our community of participants, facilitators, and alumni. We make all iterations of our course openly available under a CC BY license. As a result, our community has created countless derivative trainings, faculty presentations, workshops, courses and open education, open access and open culture communication materials. Community members have also translated course reading content and made it available as open educational resources in 10 languages: Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, English, French, Italian, Slovak, Spanish, Turkish, and Yoruba.

Now, we are pleased to announce the latest revision of our course content available on our Certificate Resources page, accessible and downloadable in multiple file formats.

With the 2024 course content, we hope to reach new audiences, and we invite new translation projects to help us.  Translation work could mean both updating existing translations or creating entirely new ones. If you’re interested in making the CC Certificate course content available in your own local language(s) by participating in a future translation project, please reach out to us at certificates [at] creativecommons.org for more information.

If you’re interested in a CC Certificate course, you can learn more and register for our upcoming June 2024 and September 2024 options on our website. If you are already CC Certified, we encourage you to share your experiences with your colleagues and to become an active participant in our alumni community, where you can read our alumni newsletter, learn about additional training opportunities, and participate in upcoming community projects. Contact certificates [at] creativecommons.org  if you are not already on the alumni listserv and we will add you.

We send a special thanks to the many wonderful CC staff, Certificate course facilitators, community members and volunteers who help make this work possible. We’re looking forward to continued improvements to the CC Certificate program as we explore new audiences and new opportunities to help you reach your open education goals.

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Today, Creative Commons is releasing new guidelines for open culture: Nudging Users to Reference Institutions when Using Public Domain Materials.

These guidelines have been developed by CC’s Open Culture Team in collaboration with the Open Culture Platform Working Group to investigate use of CC BY to designate holders of public domain collections, led by Deborah De Angelis and Tomoaki Watanabe, and members of the Open Culture Platform.

Whether the institution is a neighborhood archive, a national library, or an art museum, the guidelines offer a fresh and innovative approach to prompting users to reference the institution when using public domain materials. Based on the Working Group’s proposal for a social intervention, they present various design ideas, rooted in the EAST Model for behavioral change.

What problem are these guidelines addressing?

Often, institutions wish to be acknowledged for the role they play preserving, restoring, digitizing, sharing, and overall providing context and meaning for the cultural heritage that they steward. To ensure users “credit” them, many institutions choose CC licenses (which require “attribution”) to release faithful reproductions of public domain material. This is bad practice. Digital reproductions of public domain materials should remain in the public domain and thus be shared under CC0 or PDM.

As a best practice, CC recommends a simple framework to create behavioral change and encourage positive outcomes through “nudges.” The guidelines offer a few design ideas for institutions to provide a comprehensive “reference statement,” if and where appropriate.

The guidelines address key questions, including:

• How can institutions nudge users to reference them?
• What information should be included in a reference statement?
• What would a nudge look like in practice?
• How to organize the data needed to implement these ideas?

The guidelines are available on the Open Culture Resources page. Download the complete guidelines.

Are you ready to implement one of these designs? Do you have comments on how to expand or improve these guidelines, especially on the technical aspects? Would you like to help make this resource available in other languages?

• Contact us at info@creativecommons.org
• Join the Open Culture Platform to engage with peers
• Sign up for our volunteer translation process

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