Many people can benefit from open access to cultural heritage in a variety of ways and for a variety of purposes — from creators seeking inspiration to researchers discovering new interpretations, all the way to cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) connecting with more audiences, and the general public making sense of the world we live in. In our report What are the Benefits of Open Culture? A new CC Publication, we show how, by removing any distance between people and heritage, openness gives rise to a multitude of connections with, about, or through cultural heritage. 

The CC licenses and public domain tools are a simple and effective way for CHIs, such as museums, libraries and archives, to make heritage materials (and associated metadata) open so that they can be shared widely for the broadest possible access, use and reuse (including commercial use and modification), free of charge, and with no or few copyright restrictions. 

Navigating the right license or tool can be tricky, as CHIs may share a wide range of different types of materials. But if you remember only one thing, it’s that faithful digital reproductions of public domain materials must stay in the public domain — no new copyright or related right applies to the digitized version. Public domain materials are materials that are no longer or never were protected by copyright.

This is a position that Creative Commons (CC) has been championing for years as part of our Open Culture Program. In other words, no new copyright (or related right) should arise over the creation of a digitized “twin.” Europeana and the Communia Association, among many other open culture organizations, share this position. It is also aligns with Article 14 of the 2019 EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which states that: “when the term of protection of a work of visual art has expired, any material resulting from an act of reproduction of that work is not subject to copyright […]”.

It’s also important to remember that digital reproductions of public domain works cannot be CC-licensed, since CC licenses can only be used with in-copyright content. Instead, we recommend using a CC public domain tool, putting the digital reproductions squarely and unequivocally into the public domain. This not only conveys clear information about the public domain status of the materials, it also contributes to the thriving, blooming commons of knowledge and culture that we need to address the world’s most pressing problems.

Some CHIs might want to get credit for sharing heritage from their collections. It is not good practice to use a license in this case. Instead, there are different ways to encourage users to refer back to CHIs, as we explain in Nudging Users To Reference Institutions When Using Public Domain Materials. The guidelines offer a fresh and innovative approach to prompting users to reference the institution when using public domain materials and present various design ideas to instigate behavioral change. They 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?

Regarding metadata, we strongly encourage that it be dedicated to the public domain using the legal tool Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0). Data is largely made of highly factual content that is considered uncopyrightable, but uncertainties might remain. The CC0 waiver places all data squarely and unequivocally in the public domain worldwide and clarifies that data reuse is not restricted by copyright, related rights or database rights — those rights are all surrendered. CC0 can support maximizing the reuse of data, with benefits including: 

• enabling others to validate, replicate and put the data to new uses
• facilitating enhanced collaboration and enrichment
• increasing transparency 
• speeding the discovery and understanding of solutions to planetary and societal needs.

For materials created by the CHIs and protected by copyright, we recommend CC BY-SA 4.0, CC BY 4.0 or CC0 1.0 to enable maximum dissemination and reuse.

For different types of content, we recommend different CC tools or licenses to achieve optimal engagement and reuse, as summarized in this table: 

Using CC licenses and public domain tools to share cultural heritage materials unlocks vast potential for open culture to blossom in the cultural heritage sector. By offering enhanced legal certainty, CHIs have the ability to engage more deeply in the open culture movement and make their vast collections openly accessible to everyone.

For more information:

• Download this information
• Learn more about our license stewardship
• Join the CC Open Culture Platform
• Join the TAROCH Coalition 
• Take our CC Certificate online training

Contact us at info@creativecommons.org  

The post Recommended Licenses and Tools for Cultural Heritage Content appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today we in the Open Culture Program are releasing a new publication: Don’t be a Dinosaur; or, The Benefits of Open Culture.

Following in the footsteps of open culture pioneers, many institutions are taking the leap to open their collections online, partly as a way to celebrate a sense of (re)connection with cultural heritage collections in the digital space. While the road to OC is strewn with barriers, its benefits are well worth the journey. 

This report distills the many views expressed in our Open Culture Voices (OCV) series about the ways in which so many people can benefit from open culture. In short: 

• Openly shared cultural heritage: 
  • is easier to find
  • reaches broader and more diverse audiences
  • can be preserved, safeguarded and refined in digital form
  • can be (re)used with more legal certainty
• Open cultural heritage leads to: 
  • More resilient and relevant collection holders
  • More vibrant research and more participatory education
  • More dynamic cultural creativity
  • More just, democratic, diverse, free, and equitable societies

To find out more:

• Read the full report
• Take a look at the one-page summary
• Watch the OCV series’ introduction video
• Check out each expert’s individual blog posts with links to their videos

→ To stay informed about our open culture work:

• Sign up for our open culture mailing list
• Join the open culture platform
• Visit our website on open culture
• Sign up for our Open Culture Matters newsletter

The post What are the Benefits of Open Culture? A new CC Publication appeared first on Creative Commons.

The J. Paul Getty Museum just released more than 88 thousand works under Creative Commons Zero (CCØ), putting the digital images of items from its impressive collection squarely and unequivocally into the public domain. 

This is in line with our advocacy efforts at Creative Commons (CC): digital reproductions of public domain material must remain in the public domain. In other words, no new copyright should arise over the creation of a digitized “twin.”

According to the museum’s press release, “users can download, edit, and repurpose high resolution images of their favorite Getty artworks without any legal restrictions.” The museum’s Open Content database is a wellspring of art that is bound to inspire myriad new creative reuses. It includes Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh’s Irises and many more treasures waiting to be explored. Since opening up, Getty has seen “an uptick in image downloads on our site, averaging about 30,000 per month.”

This announcement is a huge cause for celebration for CC’s Open Culture efforts, which strive to promote open access and better sharing of cultural heritage held in cultural heritage institutions, such as museums, libraries and archives. It is also a testament to the stewardship of our open, public-interest infrastructure of Creative Commons licenses and tools. These are free, easy-to-use, and standardized open legal tools that enable worldwide open access to creative content.

We salute the Getty for supporting a thriving public domain and encourage other institutions to engage more deeply in the open culture movement and make the world’s vast collections of public domain materials openly accessible to everyone. We recently released guidelines promoting CCØ and the Public Domain Mark alongside best-practice norms incentivizing users to refer back to institutions. 

Get Involved

For additional guidance on using CCØ to release cultural heritage materials and tailored support in developing or implementing open access policies or to get involved in promoting open culture around the world:

• Join the CC Open Culture Platform
• Sign up for our Open Culture Matters newsletter
• Support our policy initiative Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture (TAROC)
• Take our CC Certificate online training
• Contact us at info@creativecommons.org 

The post Getty Museum releases 88K+ images of artworks with CC0 appeared first on Creative Commons.

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

The post Where in the world is… this public domain material? Helping users refer to host institutions. appeared first on Creative Commons.

“Original art by illustrator Freya C. Morgan”. Internet Archive.

Join Creative Commons, Internet Archive, and many other leaders from the open world to celebrate Public Domain Day 2024. The mouse that became Mickey will finally be free of his corporate captivity as the copyright term of the 1928 animated Disney film, Steamboat Willie, expires along with that of thousands of other cultural works on the first day of 2024.

The year 1928 brought us a host of still relevant, oft-revived and remixed culture, from H.P. Lovecraft’s classic horror story, “Call of Cthulhu” (originally published in Weird Tales; now currently a popular video game), to the Threepenny Opera, a critique of income inequality and the excesses of capitalism that is surprisingly on point for our current era.

And further, classic works of literature such as Orlando by Virginia Woolfe, Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, and Black Magic by Paul Mourad; children’s literature like House on Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne, which introduced the character Tigger, and Millions of Cats by Wanda Gág; movies like Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus, and Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman; and music like Dorothy Field’s “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby” and Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” will grow the rich set of materials that are freely available to all of us as part of the public domain.

Join us for a virtual celebration at 10am PT / 1pm ET on 25 January, 2024, with an amazing lineup of academics, librarians, musicians, artists and advocates coming together to help illuminate the significance of this new class of works entering the public domain!

Of course our program wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of Generative AI, which to some has become a new kind of Eldritch God unleashed upon humanity—a Chtulhu of sorts—out to alter or control human reality. New AI technologies have raised all kinds of questions about human creativity, and the various monsters we must vanquish in order to preserve it. We’ll get into all that and more in our panel discussion of AI, Creativity and the Public Domain.

REGISTER NOW

This event is co-hosted by Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Authors Alliance, Public Knowledge, Library Futures, SPARC and the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

The post Celebrate Public Domain Day 2024 with us: Weird Tales from the Public Domain appeared first on Creative Commons.

Modern recut copy of The Great Wave off Kanagawa (神奈川沖波裏), from 36 Views of Mount Fuji, Color woodcut. Circa 1930 (original created 1829-1832). Public domain.

The Open Climate Campaign is pleased to see the recent wave of announcements requiring open access to knowledge that support our goal to make the open sharing of research outputs the norm in climate science. The Campaign recognizes that in order to generate solutions and mitigations to climate change, the knowledge (i.e. research papers, data, educational resources) about it must be open. To us, “open” means: immediately available without embargo, with an open license (or dedicated to the public domain), supporting rights retention, and published in a standardized format that enables machine readability. The emphasis on these specifics in these announcements is what is particularly exciting and different than what has come before.

This open access wave began in August 2022 with the release of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Public Access Memo, commonly referred to as the “Nelson Memo,” after Dr. Alondra Nelson, the Director of the OSTP at the time. The memo calls for each of the US Federal Agencies to make “articles resulting from all U.S. federally funded research freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories, without any embargo or delay after publication.” The memo also directs agencies to describe: “the circumstances or prerequisites needed to make the publications freely and publicly available by default, including any use and re-use rights, and which restrictions, including attribution, may apply.” Creative Commons and our partners SPARC, Harvard and American University have been working with the US agencies to help them ensure rights are retained and publicly funded research is openly licensed.

The next crest in the wave was on 20 May 2023, with the release of the G7 Leaders Communiqué, which stated that the G7 will “promote open science by equitably disseminating scientific knowledge, publicly funded research outputs including research data and scholarly publications following the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles.” Followed just a few days later, on 23 May, by the release of the Council of the European Union’s proceedings on “High-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing.” As waves are measured by the distance between consecutive crests, the decreasing time between these announcements suggests that this open wave is growing.

Once considered simply a good practice, open scholarship is becoming the default for publicly funded research. Both practitioners and decision-makers recognize how critical open access to knowledge is in understanding the world and solving the world’s greatest challenges. While open plans and policies have been cropping up across the world (e.g. Ukraine, Montenegro), these announcements have stipulations that require not just open access to publications, but immediate access and “supporting the rights of researchers to publish, share, disseminate and communicate openly the results and data of their research…as well as maximum accessibility and reusability of research results.” These broader definitions of open match CC’s strategy for better sharing: sharing that is not just open, but that is contextual, inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable. The tide has turned: it’s now not only important to make research open, but also to enable the full potential of open access by making publications accessible as quickly as possible and enabling the reuse of content and data.

The Open Climate Campaign welcomes these developments and language that aligns with our definition of open. This ongoing wave of announcements heralds real change in enabling better knowledge sharing and collaboration to solve the world’s greatest challenges.

At the Open Climate Campaign, we are working to make the open sharing of research the norm in climate science through global advocacy, one-on-one work with funders, national governments and environmental organizations; and partnerships with open projects and publishers.

You can learn more about how you can participate at www.openclimatecampaign.org.

The post An Open Wave: New Calls for Open Access appeared first on Creative Commons.

The addition of these translations is a significant milestone, as it enables even more people to access and use Creative Commons licenses in their native tongue. The Danish translation of CC 4.0 licenses and deeds was first started in 2019 by a team of official translators from the European Commission, coordinated by Pedro Malaquias. In 2022, the Danish Agency for Digital Government requested the translation to be completed, with the aim of recommending the use of CC licenses to public authorities and administrations. Peter Leth led the effort to complete the Danish translation.

Here is the CC BY 4.0 deed.

In addition, the Western Frisian language is now available for CC 4.0 licenses and deeds. Spoken by about 350,000 people in Fryslân, a province in the north of the Netherlands, the Western Frisian language is closer to English than Dutch or German, making it a unique language on the European mainland. This translation was made possible thanks to the initiative of Friduwih Riemersma, a poetry translator, with help from CC Netherlands volunteer and copyright lawyer Maarten Zeinstra. This translation allows for greater inclusivity and accessibility for the Frisian-speaking community.

Here is the CC BY 4.0 deed.

Finally, the CC0 public domain release and deed are now available in German. The lack of an official German translation of CC0 was a significant barrier to the adoption of Creative Commons legal tools in Germany, and the translation will now enable the German-speaking community to use CC0 as a standard legal tool for their work. The German translation was made possible thanks to the hard work of Till Jaeger, Ruth Oppenheimer, Paul Klimpel, Stefan Kaufmann, Maximilian Gausepohl, and John Weitzmann.

Here is the CC0 deed.

We hope these translations will allow more people to understand and use the Creative Commons licenses and other legal tools, leading to a more open and accessible world. Congratulations to all the teams involved in these efforts, and a big thank you to all the supporters and contributors who made these translations possible.

Contributing to the translation of CC licenses is an excellent way to show your support for our work and help make the world a more open and accessible place. To get involved with our future translation projects, please reach out to legal@creativecommons.org.

The post New official translations of CC legal tools published in Danish, Frisian, and German appeared first on Creative Commons.

Digital Community Heritage

Led by Bettina Fabos and Mariana Ziku, the Digital Community Heritage Working Group focused on international community-related heritage initiatives in the context of open access and inclusive digital transformation. The collaborative research carried out in the course of a year aimed to map and analyze the openness spectrum and typology of digital community heritage initiatives, which included collecting international cases, performing data analysis and visualization, providing insights into patterns and trends, and identifying good practices and common challenges in the field. The output of this research includes the publication of a data-driven multilingual study discussing digital community heritage and open-access, and a published machine readable dataset of 27 international digital community heritage initiatives with information structured into several categories. Read a summary of the study on CC’s Medium in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Swahili. You can find out more about the WG on their PubPub website.
Access the dataset and data visualizations folder.

Watch the webinar recording for an overview of the project and its outputs.

Traditional Knowledge and Copyright Intersections

Led by Connor Benedict and Alhassan Mohammed Awal, the Traditional Knowledge and Copyright Intersections Working Group was created on the acknowledgement that the needs and circumstances of groups and resources that fall under the broad category of indigenous knowledge are both varied and specific. To determine the value and applicability of CC licenses and CC principles to these varied groups requires knowledge and understanding that only the members of those groups hold. The WG sought to gain a better sense of the important issues pertaining to the relationship between traditional knowledge, groups, and resources and the CC licenses and CC principles and copyright. The output of the WG includes a webinar series featuring three speakers with lived experience, as well as experts who have worked with impacted groups, as well as an article on CC’s Medium which includes a summary and recordings of the webinars.

Watch the webinar recording for an overview of the project and its outputs.

Archiving New and Emergent Media 

Led by Connor Benedict and Abdul Dube, the working group was created based on the recognition that the majority of open GLAM work had been focused on big institutions and traditional heritage, with little support and knowledge available for smaller organizations and their contemporary archiving and documenting needs. The working group believed that traditional and larger heritage institutions could significantly benefit from collaborating with smaller organizations and private collections. In the future digital culture and the growing digitization of cultural heritage, one of the main challenges would be the vast amount of heritage material in the digital realm, which would be unmanageable for big institutions without cooperation from other players in the field of digital cultural heritage. The group’s goals were to (1) highlight the archiving practices, innovations, and needs of a variety of contemporary organizations and (2) create a resource for anyone interested in contemporary archiving to explore and gain knowledge from.

A series of interviews with cultural organizations was conducted by the working group, and a co-created zine was produced, which is available for download and will be available at CC events in 2023. More information about the group’s work can be found on Medium.

Watch the webinar recording for an overview of the project and its outputs.

Public domain collections referenced by CC BY to designate collections holders

Led by Deborah De Angelis and Tomoaki Watanabe, this Working Group discussed a particular use of CC licenses, typically a CC BY license by cultural heritage institutions (CHIs). In digital archives, we sometimes see collections provided under a CC BY license, or other CC licenses,even when the original work is in the public domain, and the digitization does not generate any new copyright. The provider of such work, typically a CHI, is presumably not a copyright holder, and their license is technically invalid. The working group discussed causes, a range of potential interventions, and pros and cons of the interventions. They recommended Creative Commons and other similar entities the following: 1) change the content of the CC0 pages to facilitate communication of CHIs to make a legally non-binding, courtesy request to receive credit, 2) not develop a new legal tool which obligates attribution to CHIs, and 3) promote giving credits to CHIs. Their output includes 1) a brief report, 2) illustrated version of the report’s highlights (available from the above-mentioned report), and 3) a webinar. 

Watch the webinar recording for an overview of the project and its outputs.

Open GLAM Resources

Led by Revekka Kefalea and Jesse Carson, this working group aimed to develop practical resources for the open culture / open GLAM sector. As resources dealing with copyright, open licensing, and GLAMs proliferate in the form of academic and gray literature, reports, magazine articles, blogs, etc., it becomes increasingly important to ensure that they are discoverable and accessible. Gathering literature together in the form of a bibliography that can be added to by the global community is one way to encourage the sharing and use of these resources. Similarly, as terms and concepts related to open licensing and GLAMs grow in usage, there is value in gathering definitions and establishing relationships between concepts, and facilitating their translation into many languages. For these reasons, they considered it important to start collecting information about these resources, and making them easily discoverable — not only for those already working, researching, and advocating in the field, but also for newcomers interested in exploring and contributing to the Open Culture/GLAM world. Similarly, they thought it was important to gather working definitions and descriptions of terms relevant to Open Culture/GLAM, establish relationships between those concepts, and facilitate their translation into other languages. With these two goals in mind, they decided to co-create a bibliography to capture Open Culture/GLAM literature, and a glossary to capture Open Culture/GLAM terminology. You can read more about the group’s work in their article on CC’s Medium. The group’s resources can be found as follows: 

1. Open Culture/GLAM Resources Zotero Group Library: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4612906/open_culture__glam_resources/library 
2. Open Culture/GLAM Resources Zotero Group: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4612906/open_culture__glam_resources
3. Zotero Library – “How to contribute” guide on Meta-Wiki: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Culture/GLAM_Glossary/Zotero_Library 
4. Open Culture/GLAM Glossary Meta-Wiki page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Culture/GLAM_Glossary 

Watch the webinar recording for an overview of the project and its outputs.

Do you also want to get involved? Don’t hesitate!

• Become a member of the CC Open Culture Platform
• Sign up to the CC Open Culture mailing list
• Join the #cc-openglam Slack channel
• Participate in CC Open Culture Platform calls — they are announced in the Slack channel and on the mailing list

The post CC’s Open Culture Platform 2022: Five Working Groups Share Their Highlights appeared first on Creative Commons.

From 1 January (Public Domain Day) to 15 February 2022, we ran a multilingual online survey using Google Forms to share a 50-question questionnaire in English, French and Spanish. We received responses from 133 field practitioners — working in libraries, museums and archives and other areas of open culture — from 44 different countries on five continents. 

This report showcases one of the many ways in which we at CC strive to support our global Open Culture community in realizing a vision for better sharing of cultural heritage: we develop and steward a legal, social, and technical infrastructure that supports open sharing that is impactful, generative, equitable and resilient. The insights gained from this report are crucial in guiding our efforts to improve the accessibility and usability of our public domain tools for the cultural heritage community. At CC, we are committed to improving our response to the needs of our global community and supporting better sharing, and the maintenance of our licenses and tools, focused on the communities they serve, takes center stage. 

With this report, we gain valuable insight into the unique needs and challenges of the cultural heritage community with regard to our public domain tools: the public domain mark (PDM) and the public domain dedication tool (CC0).

Key findings include: 

• The top reason to release content openly is to “increase the institution’s presence, visibility, reach and relevance online.”
• While about a little less than a third share a small part of the collection with CC0 or PDM, only about 4% share their entire collection with either tool. 
• The CC website is by far the number one source of information on CC public domain tools.
• About one third do not know which of CC0 or PDM is better to use to release digital reproductions of items in collections.
• 72% see how CC public domain tools can make a difference in how the institution shares its collection.

We also define pathways to address those needs, with strategic recommendations to guide future actions in four steps:

• Step 1: Get to know and understand our global community better
• Step 2: Raise awareness, offer guidance and build capacity
• Step 3: Explore legal and technical improvements to the tools
• Step 4: Probe unmet needs 

With the recommendations outlined in this report, we are well-positioned to address the unique needs and challenges of the cultural heritage community, and to further our mission of promoting better sharing and equitable access to cultural heritage.

Do you also want to get involved? Don’t hesitate!

• Become a member of the CC Open Culture Platform
• Sign up to the CC Open Culture mailing list
• Join the #cc-openglam Slack channel
• Participate in CC Open Culture Platform calls — they are announced in the Slack channel and on the mailing list

The post CC Needs Assessment Report on Public Domain Tools in Cultural Heritage Sector Unveils Key Insights appeared first on Creative Commons.

A cropped version of “‘Espejo exterior o espía’.” by Biblioteca Rector Machado y Nuñez is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0. with a white CC open culture logo

2022 was quite a year for the Creative Commons (CC) Open Culture Program, thanks to generous funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing & Peter Baldwin, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. In this blog post, we take a look back at some of the year’s highlights in our program’s four components: Policy, Infrastructure, Capacity building, and Community engagement. 

Policy 

Engaging with UNESCO to promote open culture in the framework of MONDIACULT 2022, we hosted UNESCO ResiliArt x Mondiacult – From Access to Culture to Contemporary Creativity in February and heard from artists, creators, and curators about how open access is an essential ingredient for vibrant cultural life. In September, we delivered the keynote at Digitalizar en común: formas distribuidas de propiedad y autoría culturales organized by CC México — you can watch the recording on Facebook — and called participants to MONDIACULT 2022 to support better sharing of cultural heritage. We welcomed the Mexico City Declaration for Culture, declaring culture a global public good, and celebrated UNESCO’s Memory of the World’s 30th anniversary.

Members of the open culture community from both the CC copyright platform and the CC open culture platform alongside global supporters co-drafted the policy paper Towards Better Sharing of Cultural Heritage — An Agenda for Copyright Reform, published in April, to serve as a reference point for the community’s advocacy work in copyright reform in the cultural heritage context. It is available in 6 languages, and more translations are coming. The paper was the basis for discussion during a virtual workshop in May, which paved the way for the development of a guide for policymakers Towards better sharing of cultural heritage — A Creative Commons Call to Action to Policymakers, released in December. We will be presenting the guide at Open Nederland’s Public Domain Day on January 13, 2023, among other events.  

We also pushed for better exceptions and limitations for cultural heritage in international copyright law at the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) in May, and expressed our views on Italy’s national cultural heritage digitization plan, which found an echo in our joint statement with Communia for protecting the public domain in the case opposing the Uffizi gallery in Florence to French fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier.  

Infrastructure

On Public Domain Day, January 1, 2022, we launched the CC Public Domain Tools in GLAMs – Needs Assessment to probe needs around CC tools in the cultural heritage sector, notably galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs). A survey was shared in English, French and Spanish, and gathered 133 responses from 43 countries on five continents. We are currently processing the data and will soon publish a report and roadmap for future action. Watch this space! 

Capacity building

January marked the launch of the first Open Culture/GLAM Certificate cohort of 20 participants from six countries. And in February, CC made scholarships available for the June and September Certificate courses. The scholarships enabled participants from eight countries to take the June Certificate alone — including colleagues from Open Future, Wikimedia Italy, University of Leeds, the Wasila Museum, and other academic and research institutions. Thinking about enrolling in our next CC Certificate cohort? Check out this interview with Revekka Kefalea, a graduate of the CC Certificate for GLAM, and read what people say about CC Certificate courses. 

You can register for a 2023 course for open Culture/GLAM. To access a 60% scholarship for a Certificate for Open Culture/GLAM course, simply (1) select a Certificate for “Open Culture” course from the 2023 list of courses. When registering for a course: (2) Select the option to “add promo code” and type in: Y2GLAMSCHOLAR60%. That will provide you with a 60% discount on registration, while tickets last. Note: there are no refunds on scholarship tickets.  

We also offer on-demand training and consulting services. Reach out (info@creativecommons.org) to find out more.

Community engagement 

Throughout the year, we facilitated the Open Culture Platform, a space for heritage professionals and open advocates to share resources. We held monthly calls and organized several collaboration opportunities, including six working groups tackling emerging issues, such as traditional knowledge and copyright, heritage materials from community-driven initiatives, contemporary archiving of cultural heritage, “attribution” models for public domain materials, a glossary and bibliography of open culture, and the ethics of open sharing. Interested in joining the platform? Read a few members’ experiences of taking part in platform activities, and become a member yourself! Keep an eye out for the working groups’ reports and webinar recordings, coming soon on CC’s Medium. 

In January, we launched CC Open Culture VOICES, a multilingual series of 35 short interviews with dozens of distinguished experts from around the world — historians, researchers, activists, curators, professors, and many others — which engaged 3 million people across multiple platforms. Stay tuned for Season 2, a whole series of new episodes to be released in the coming months! 

We also published eight community case studies, which show some of the opportunities, challenges, and needs of low-capacity and non-Western cultural heritage institutions. This helped us discover diverse and inclusive avenues of engagement with the global community, as well as generate a more global, inclusive, and equitable picture and understanding of open culture. 

On Valentine’s Day, February 14, we launched the Open Culture Remix Art Contest calling on artists to remix public domain or openly licensed works from open GLAM collections. Not only did this showcase contemporary creativity, it also canvassed the importance of CC’s infrastructure for the dissemination and revitalization of culture. Take a look at the 1st place winner’s work:  

In July, we published a comprehensive report on the Barriers to Open Culture, which lays out the legal, financial, resource, and technical barriers faced by institutions wishing to open their collections. We looked at past research, notably Andrea Wallace’s Barriers to Open Access, and analyzed our VOICES interviews for a wide range of insights, coming up with Money, People and Policy as the three main barriers. In 2023, we aspire to develop a report on the Benefits of Open Culture. 

We have lots of other plans for 2023 and can’t wait to start a new chapter of CC’s Open Culture program. Want to stay informed and participate? Make sure to join our Open Culture Platform and sign up to our mailing list. You can also visit the CC Blog for more on open culture news (we hosted and attended numerous webinars, expert talks, panel discussions and community gatherings, check them out) and subscribe to the CC Newsletter for CC-wide updates. You can also go back in time and listen to a presentation of the open culture program on the podcast Open Minds… from Creative Commons, giving an overview of activities in February 2022.

?Do you want to know more about open culture at Creative Commons? Write to us at info@creativecommons.org. 

The post 2022 in Review: a Look at Creative Commons’ Open Culture Program appeared first on Creative Commons.