Creative Commons

CC is excited to share our featured artists who have been commissioned to create limited-edition merch designs for our 25th anniversary! Check out their work (in order of appearance below). Merch with the new designs will drop in July 🔥 🎨 Abraham K. Tumwine is a 20-year-old Ugandan digital mixed-media artist, synthesizing painting, 3D modeling, and animation. His work explores the intersection of Afrocentricity and the breadth of global Black culture, examining how these identities have been shaped, translated and reimagined within shifting landscapes. To ensure each piece remains an open dialogue with the viewer, he also weaves together a cryptic visual language of contemporary doodles, modern signage, and ancient African symbols. 🎨 JUM is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist currently based in Brazil after spending a decade living in Asia. Her practice has evolved and transformed around digital illustration and animations, mural painting, and exploring mixed media paintings and embroidery. Influenced by surrealism, early modern art, and Brazilian folk traditions, JUM creates dreamlike landscapes shaped by organic and imagined natural elements. Her work explores themes of belonging, womanhood, cultural memory, and the experience of returning home, creating visually striking compositions that aim to move beyond rational thought and connect with the viewer’s primal emotional world. 🎨 Amogh Bhatnagar designs books, visual identities, editorial illustrations, and exhibition publications, and is interested in how images, text, and structure produce meaning together. His practice involves image-making using collage as the primary medium to mediate between images that are already made, and images that can be made. The source material comes from various places: old books, the internet, and images of old books on the internet. 🎨 Ellis Tolsma a freelance illustrator and visual artist from Utrecht, the Netherlands. She uses a cheerful and graphic visual language inspired by vintage children's books, patterns & toys. Her work is characterized by geometric shapes, bold color combinations, abstractions, and a retro touch, which is enhanceed by printing with an old-fashioned risoprinter. Ellis also runs Studio Misprint and believes in the importance of constantly reimagining the creative process and making mistakes on the way.

The promise of open science is that openly available knowledge accelerates discovery, enabling researchers to collaborate more effectively, build on prior work, and advance new innovations and understandings of our world. CC's panel event "The Legacy & History of Open Science" will reflect on the origins of the movement, the milestones that shaped its growth, and the communities and infrastructures that continue to sustain it today. Hear from panel speakers Melissa Hagemann, John Wilbanks, and moderator Monica Granados.

If you weren't able to make the Legacy & History of Open Education event last week, now is your chance to see what you missed! Watch the event recording of CC's panel of Open Education experts as they share stories from the global movement. https://buff.ly/8F2vWm5

We have some big things coming, including a revamped general newsletter! Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any upcoming events, recent blog posts, and more. https://buff.ly/TubuANA

📣 Librarians, open culture practitioners, and educators 📣 There are still spots left in our CC Certificate courses that run June 1-August 9, 2026. Learn about CC licenses and become a knowledge resource at your institution through this interactive, engaging, and one-of-a-kind learning opportunity. Register today!

CC's virtual panel event The Legacy & History of Open Education is tomorrow! Hear from experts across the movement as they reflect on the origins of the open education movement, the milestones that defined its evolution, and the communities that carried it forward across regions and generations. Speakers include Kathryn Kure, Cable Green, PhD, Angela DeBarger, and Jennryn Wetzler. If you haven't yet, register now! https://lnkd.in/gDqgVPwc

Thanks to generous donors like Mark Waks and Diane Cabell, CC can continue to champion and facilitate the sharing of human creativity online! Cory Doctorow's new art book, Canny Valley, perfectly encapsulates the beauty and importance of this sharing. Canny Vally is a collection of 80 of his best collages, and donors who contribute $125 or more to Creative Commons' Keep the Internet Human campaign will receive a signed copy of the book while supplies last! Give a gift and get yours today! https://lnkd.in/ghwTmn5m

We recently shared an update on the evolution of CC signals. As AI systems increasingly extract value from the commons without adequate consent, attribution, or transparency, sustaining a healthy commons requires stronger governance and accountability. This reflects a shift in our approach: from expressing preferences to rebalancing power to protect the commons. In our newest blog post, we share several high-impact interventions we are advancing to restore trust, strengthen participation, and embed public interest values into the AI knowledge ecosystem.

Open preprint practices are crucial for immediate sharing of scientific research, and our preprint policy framework is a model for promoting preprints. A growing community of research funders and organizations agree, including Gates Foundation, Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s | ASAP, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Learn more on the ASAPbio preprint policy framework website! https://lnkd.in/g78Fcq7Y Photo credit to HHMI/Toby Hayman. Source: https://lnkd.in/g5gRrGdZ

Look what made it to UNESCO House 👀 You can never have too many tote bags. Especially when they're this cute! Get yours from our revamped merch store: https://buff.ly/cFFvRQc