Curationist Licensing & Open Access Policies

Internationally Operative and Permissive Legal Licensing

The Curationist platform has been built with the intention of removing barriers to the use of their content. This means that all source content brought into the Curationist platform is designed to utilize the most internationally operative and permissive legal tools, which are Creative Commons Zero Public Domain Dedication (CC0) and the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY). Curationist has been designed to build all its work consistently on top of these two frameworks to make it as easily accessible and usable as possible by any number of users across industries and locations. These legal tools allow true platforms that others can build upon freely, with attribution when required, unencumbered. They are the path of least resistance with internal legal departments at potential partner organizations and reduce the need for intensive negotiation, terms, and processing time.

Designed To Support Commercial Use and Reuse

The Curationist platform is designed to import source content designated only by CC0 and CC-BY because they are the CC legal tools that most clearly support commercial remix, reuse, and use by third parties. Adherence to CC license terms is necessary not only for corporations but also for artists, individual creators, and open educational resource creators as they develop their own content in partnership with the Foundation. Curationist has designed its API tools to avoid any legal tools and licensing models that prohibit commercial use and reuse.

Non-Restrictive Terms

The Curationist platform do not currently support any legal tool or licensing model that introduces restrictive terms, including the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark (which has global jurisdictional limitations), Share-Alike, or Non-Commercial tools. Additionally, the Curationist platform relies solely on Creative Commons for licensing tools and will not implement a bespoke legal tool or licensing framework, nor incorporate content from source institutions that use such terms. While this might leave out some potentially useful content, the clarity of terms and clarity of usage rights is paramount for Curationist, those it invites to co-produce content with on or for the platform, and external third parties providing content.

Non-Exclusivity

Curationist only accepts content submissions on non-exclusive terms. This is because, first, CC0 and CC-BY 4.0 content can be used by anyone (in the case of CC-BY 4.0, with attribution by giving appropriate credit, providing a link to the license, and indicating if changes were made), and second, by definition, open access content with these designations cannot be offered with exclusive terms.

Content produced on or for the Curationist platform is always produced on non-exclusive terms. This extends to data, metadata schemas, featured texts, collections, and APIs.

Curationist Brand, Logos, and Trademark

The Curationist brand, logos, and trademark are distinct from the content on the rest of the Curationist platform. In contrast to media assets and text published on and external to the website, the Curationist Foundation, and Curationist brand, logos, and trademark are not open access assets. The Curationist Foundation retains all rights to brand, logos, and trademark, and these should not be shared inline with content otherwise produced on the site.

Public API Accessibility

The Curationist Public API is a critical resource for the open-access platform. Some institutions elect to use an API key for perceived security risk and as a way to manage analytics. However, most progressive institutions use open public APIs where access is immediate and unrestricted. As Curationist will only be making data and media available, which comes through a process of transformation from CC0 and CC0-BY sources, it has no privacy or security reason to restrict access, as it presents and represents public information.