TO SHARE OR NOT TO SHARE ? Creative Commons maybe your answer

You just saw a case that was so unique or so typical that you are dying to share with your colleagues, students or the World Wide Web at large.

Were you just asked to contribute a picture or content for a publication or presentation?

And now you are thorn between the natural academic, and professional desire to share for the greater good, and the practical realities of life that may cause you considerable problems if you do.

The content may not be yours to share. Today's academic and hospital settings ensure that patients are inevitably seen by at the very least two disciplines and often many more. Under those circumstances, ownership of the content to be shared needs to be agreed upon by all. The lack of agreement and clarity is perhaps the greatest cause of information not being shared at all, and remaining unused in departmental archives.

The next complication arises when after sharing the content; you realize that you no longer can use it due to copyright issues, with the person or publication that used the material having the ownership now.

 So, does all this mean we should stop sharing?

Thankfully, no.

There is a way out that is both cost-free and hassle-free.  You or your department/s can share content to be used anywhere while holding the copyright of the material.

Creative Commons (CC) as shared on their website "is a nonprofit organization that helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world's pressing challenges". Currently, over 1.6 billion works are registered under the creative commons, including free to access journals across all disciplines. 

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/ https://vimeo.com/13590841

Wanna Work Together? from Creative Commons on Vimeo.

With different licenses that allow various levels of freedom of sharing the work, a creative license is an excellent solution for sharing your work or findings without the risk of losing your rights to the content. 

I have been using creative commons licensing for some time now. Last year I received a request for a Carcinoma Cuniculatum picture, rather than worrying about all the possibilities, I licensed the image, and then shared it. 

Mandana Donoghue / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

I hope you will find this information useful; there is also excellent information available on the creative commons platform, and other sites on the nature, details and use of the licensing.

Happy sharing.

   # Creative Commons,