Creative Commons Overview

Creative Commons Overview#

Overview#

Creative Commons (CC) is a global non-profit organization that provides free, legally sound tools to enable sharing, collaboration, and reuse of creative works. Through its widely used open licenses, Creative Commons facilitates open access to content while ensuring that authors can maintain control over how their work is used. Its mission is to promote knowledge-sharing and creativity across academia, art, science, education, and government sectors.

Note: Similar to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), which promotes and protects open-source software licenses, Creative Commons focuses on providing open licenses for creative and educational works. Both organizations support open access and transparency, but OSI primarily targets software and code, while Creative Commons applies to a broader range of creative and academic content, such as text, images, educational materials, and multimedia.

Contact#

For general inquiries, please reach out to info@creativecommons.org.
For press/media inquiries, contact: communications@creativecommons.org.

Personnel#

Creative Commons is led by CEO Anna Tumadóttir, supported by staff, Board Members, Advisory Council, and Audit Committee, along with a global community of affiliates and legal experts.

Members and Academic Collaborations#

Creative Commons has worked with a variety of institutions worldwide, including universities, museums, libraries, and governments. Some key academic collaborations include:

  • MIT’s OpenCourseWare, using Creative Commons licenses to make educational materials freely accessible.

  • University of Nebraska at Omaha, which collaborated with Creative Commons to create a microcredential course on Open Educational Resources (OER).

  • Campaigns like #FreeTheTextbook, advocating for the use of open textbooks in universities globally.

These initiatives reflect Creative Commons’ broader commitment to supporting the academic open-source movement. By providing the legal framework for open access to educational content, CC empowers educators, researchers, and students to share and build on knowledge freely while ensuring creators’ rights are respected. Through its licenses and tools, CC fosters collaboration, transparency, and innovation in academia.

Funders#

Creative Commons is proudly supported by contributions from the following organizations and foundations: the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Arcadia Fund, Argosy Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, MHz Foundation, Michelson 20MM Foundation, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Filecoin Foundation, Caktus Group, Private Internet Access, ReCoalition, Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Siegel Family Endowment, Stewart J. Guss – Attorney at Law, Open Society Foundations, Amazon Web Services, CouponFollow, DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Levin of the Levin Firm, and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP.

To learn more about how Creative Commons contributes to open education, visit their Education page.

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