Extra thing, Week 9: Common creativity

I'm skipping podcasting for the moment (I'm cooking up a little something though, hopefully it'll be worth the wait!), so for the time being there will be a few more pretty pictures and a bit of serious discussion, as I tackle Creative Commons licensing.  

Share and share alike...
Image by  Richard Masoner / Cyclelicious

The whole idea of a creative commons license, brought about by a non-profit organisation founded in 2001, is a spectacularly good one. As individuals we can bring a lot of different skills to the collective (now usually web-based) table - for example, you might be a whiz with words but poor with pictures, so you might find it difficult to beautify your product, be it a blog or a book, and get it noticed. What's more, a lot of us don't have the money or the inclination to fork out for royalties and access to copyrighted material. Luckily, the more artistically-challenged of us now have a vast array of striking images at our fingertips, thanks to some talented people with an open, giving personality. Such as the cyclist photographer who snapped this sign, which I think wouldn't go amiss in Cambridge! (On the subject of images though, I inserted both of these using imagecodr - a cracking idea but the formatting seems to go haywire if I want to centre or move the image around...any suggestions?)

Of course, pictures are only the tip of the iceberg. The Creative Commons infrastructure is used by some huge names, such as Al Jazeera TV, rock band Nine Inch Nails and famously, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) group of journals. I can understand that some artists/creators would want to jealously guard their work, as it is their livelihood, but Nine Inch Nails proved that you can share content and still make money, as they simply legislated for what their fans were probably doing anyway, and in so doing won a lot of respect from music fans everywhere, which bore fruit when their next tour was a massive sellout.

A little more sharing
Image by by  Duncan~ 

Of course, that is but one example. A more pertinent one for libraries is the set-up at PLoS. I went to one of the Arcadia seminars in the winter about open source publishing (see "Reengineering the scholarly journal" here), some of which was laudable (sharing databases of results and disseminating vital scientific research as quickly as possible) and other aspects of which were a bit worrying (cutting out the human element of the review system and publishing articles before they've been vetted at all). However the creative commons license deals with and facilitates the rapid dissemination of results and research, which is crucial in our community, where new diseases and issues can spread across the world within weeks and need to be targeted as quickly as possible. So socially it's great, but even better, it doesn't harm the authors of the content; they don't generally receive much (if anything) for writing the article at all, but transmission of their name and reputation worldwide is critical, as academic salaries often depend on that oh-so-difficult-to-define phenomenon, "wider impact".

All in all, I think we can agree that the CC idea is A Good Thing for content-makers and content-users of all shapes and sizes.