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Impact


"Ultraman + Mt. Fuji = JAPAN" by Emran Kassim, here cropped, is licensed under CC BY 2.0.


Our Global Impact

Across every field of human activity, people rely on access to knowledge. But the barriers to sharing differ from sector to sector, with AI intensifying existing challenges:

Researchers struggle to share data across institutions and borders.

Educators seek to provide accessible resources to meet the needs of their students.

Cultural heritage institutions have the mission to make heritage accessible but face legal, economic, and technological constraints.

Journalists need clarity when reusing images, data, and multimedia, and news outlets need media they can freely reuse.

Governments want to release public information transparently and responsibly.

Creators need clarity about how their works can be used, especially in training datasets or generative outputs.

CC tools provide shared legal and technical language for reuse, attribution, and sharing in a world where both humans and machines are generating and processing content.

CC’s Priority Areas: Education, Science, and Culture

Although CC tools apply to countless domains, three areas form the foundation of global knowledge sharing: education, science, and culture. They are CC’s historical pillars and remain central because of their outsized impact on society.

Even as technology evolves, these three sectors remain the backbone of global knowledge sharing. They shape how AI is trained, evaluated, governed, and understood. We also believe that access to education, science, and culture is a requirement for healthy, functioning democracies.

Education: Because access to knowledge starts with barrier-free learning

Education shapes every person’s ability to understand, participate, and innovate in the world. But, traditional educational materials are often expensive, inaccessible, or locked behind restrictive terms.

Open Educational Resources (OER), powered by CC licenses, allow educators to create, adapt, translate, localize, and freely distribute high-quality learning materials. As OER is being used in AI-powered learning tools, we must work towards ensuring equitable, affordable, and effective learning is available to everyone, and that AI supports, rather than replaces, OER.

Open education:

Improves access, affordability, and flexibility of learning

Supports multilingual and culturally relevant materials

Empowers teachers to legally adapt content and innovate

Increases access for self-directed education and capacity building

Enables governments to scale equitable education systems

Open education also teaches learners how knowledge is created and shared, helping them evaluate AI-generated content critically. When education is open, the benefits cascade from individual learners to their broader communities.

Support Open Education

Science: Because global problems require open, global solutions

Scientific progress depends on the ability to build on existing knowledge. But siloed research, closed data, and paywalled publications slow innovation and exclude much of the world from participating.

CC supports open science by providing a shared licensing framework for research outputs, data, code, educational materials, and emerging research outputs. Our goal is to ensure all publicly-funded research outputs are available as open access with a CC license. Access to knowledge isn’t only important for human sharing but also for machine reuse. Many of the widely used large language models are trained on openly accessible knowledge—the embodiment of the potential of open science. If we are to continue to build better, more robust and representative models, open science is a necessary condition.

Open science:

Accelerates discovery

Improves reproducibility

Democratizes participation

Supports public trust and transparency

Enables collaboration across disciplines and borders

From public health to climate science, openness is essential for solving global challenges. Open science ensures that AI models are trained on high-quality, diverse, and publicly available data, not limited or biased datasets behind paywalls.

Featured Projects

Open Preprints

Open Climate

Case Study: United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)

Support Open Science

Culture: Because cultural heritage should be equitably accessible to everyone

Cultural heritage institutions preserve humanity’s collective memory. Yet millions of cultural works remain inaccessible, digitized but not shareable, or physically held but never openly displayed.

CC tools help cultural heritage institutions share digitized heritage equitably. As a result open heritage becomes an infrastructure for addressing our greatest challenges, enabling:

Education and lifelong learning across borders

Climate research through historical data

Social inclusion and accessibility

Indigenous rights and cultural sovereignty

Ethical AI development with diverse, attributed training data

Economic opportunity, generating innovation without prohibitive costs

Public access to cultural memory

Reuse of images and media in education, research, and creative work

Community participation in documenting and remixing heritage

Global discovery and preservation of cultural resources

When cultural heritage is open, creativity thrives and communities reconnect with their stories. In this era of AI, we are working to support cultural heritage institutions to ensure that:

Use of cultural content in AI systems is lawful and ethical

Communities and heritage institutions maintain agency over the heritage they steward

AI-generated works properly attribute source materials

Cultural memory remains accessible to humans in the digital environment.

Featured Projects

Open Heritage

Support Open Culture

CC Tools in Action Create a Ripple Effect

Openness in education, science, and culture creates ripple effects across all other sectors, from journalism, government, civic tech, public health, innovation, and more. They are the core knowledge systems through which people learn, understand, and create.

By supporting strong, open foundations in these three sectors, Creative Commons strengthens the entire ecosystem of global knowledge.

Education, science, and culture are the core inputs to AI systems and the core outputs of how people understand the world. Keeping them open means keeping the entire ecosystem of knowledge, creativity, and AI development equitable, innovative, and accessible.




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