'Explosion of openness' with Creative Commons

There are now more than 400 million works available on the internet under Creative Commons licences - allowing resources such as artworks, literature, films, learning materials and research articles to be shared and reused.

The Creative Commons organisation has released The Power of Open, a new book celebrating the impact of Creative Commons (CC) and highlighting individual stories. These include the adoption of CC for the Open University's OpenLearn website for course materials and the development of the open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS). The Power of Open states "The core principle behind open access journals is impact" and PLoS director of publishing Mark Patterson is quoted as saying “We set out to remove all barriers to reusing research and transforming research literature into a resource for further research,”...“CC has provided a strong, consistent signal that you can use openly published research to do with what you want”

The book also gives a useful overview of CC licences and a description of the vision for a growing culture of openness.The Power of Open © 2011 Creative Commons Corporation can be downloaded here.