The Eduserv foundation has funded a study, led by Jordan Hatcher, into the “current usage of Creative Commons (and other open content) licences by cultural heritage organisations in the UK”. The aim of the study is to try to build a snapshot of usage and plans for usage of open licenses for as broad a cross-section of cultural heritage organisations as possible. It will also strive to ascertain respondents’ knowledge of and attitudes towards open licensing. While the survey will initially examine a broad range of alternative licensing options, Jordan has indicated that the write-up will draw a distinction between those that are open and those that are not along similar lines to the Open Knowledge Definition.

The full proposal says:

If this work shows that there is a significant interest in and use of open content licences then we intend to carry out more detailed case studies with the view to producing advice for organisations considering publishing under these kinds of licences.

If you know anyone working in a cultural heritage organisation, it would be great if you could let them know about the survey! We look forward to seeing the finished report.

Related posts:

1. Free Cultural Works Definition v1.0 Released Having been working on the very similar Open Knowledge Defintion since Summer 2005 (with a v1.0 released in September last year) we were very interested when http://freedomdefined.org/ launched last May. Now after ten months of work they’ve released a stable,...
2. UK National Statistics: Are They Open or Not? I’ve used data a couple of times from the UK’s national statistics site: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/ The other day I went there to investigate their licensing as part of an effort to do a simple survey of the openness of various UK...
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