Open Access Week: Creative Commons Licensing

Open Access Week ends today. This last post focuses on Creative Commons licenses. Authors can use these tools to help them more explicitly indicate how their work can be used and shared. Specifically, "[w]ith a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit — and only on the conditions you specify... ." Simply follow the instructions provided on the "Choose a License" page. You will then be provided some HTML code to insert on your web site or you can include a link in your document to the relevant license.

The Creative Commons web site also points users to search engines that will limit their searches to resources that, in theory at least, have CC licenses.

Here are examples of various works with CC licenses (scroll to the bottom of the page to view the license):

• Blog: The Road to the Horizon [access]
• PDF document: How to find Creative Commons materials using Google [access]
  
• Photos: Flickr [access]
• Web site: Feinstein International Center [access]
• Wiki: RefugeeMap: A Wiki for Refugee Resources [access]

Finally, Google announced that authors can now distribute their CC-licensed books via Google Books. While there is not yet an option to limit one's search just to books with CC licenses, this feature should become available in the future.

Tagged Web Sites/Tools.