Beth Kanter advocates Creative Commons in the latest post on her blog about not-for-profit organizations and social media. She discusses how she's managed to introduce often quite recalcitrant nonprofit sub-sectors to the concept.
I can't comment on not-for-profits in general. From our work a while ago in the MLA sector, I got the idea that they had broadly speaking grasped the concept: new website projects were actively planning to release archive material under CC licences. But what I found most interesting was the recent development at the University of Oxford (disclosure: Torchbox developed their "corporate" website, but I write this blogpost from my perspective as an alumnus.) As an internal project they've launched a permanent online resource of research materials, the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA), and are effectively offering alumni a chunk of webspace for their DPhil theses, in perpetuity. You can also store source typesetting files, not to be viewed by the public, in case you ever need to recreate bits of the document. They have a neat and functional (if slightly buggy) interface for uploading content: the bugginess is completely and totally excused by the fact that they seem to be gradually iterating the front end of the site. Since I last visited it's got tinyurl.com references and more authorial information. I wonder if they're running an agile project behind the scenes....
It's a brilliant experience: both to see this sort of thing happening, and also to be able to take part in it. What's most exciting about ORA is that you can make your research available under a CC licence. So: although you've always been able to read it---if you really wanted to---on my own website, you can now peruse Stabilization and control in a linear ion trap in the comfort of your home, and distribute it to all your mates for free (if you don't want to have any mates any more), safe in the knowledge that you're doing so in accordance with an open and pro-distribution licencing arrangement.
My thesis had been languishing---my supervisor, being encouraging, would doubtless pooh-pooh that description---for a few years until I put it on ORA and stopped worrying about having to maintain a semi-permalink to it. When I did so, it was a matter of weeks before I was contacted with a view to publishing it. Surprising and welcome, you might think; unfortunately, the publishers in question were these people. Much has been said about them elsewhere, and I don't particularly want to repeat it here (especially as I wouldn't want to attract the Google-happy commenter.) But, would you know? Since I explained to their employee about Creative Commons, and how they'd be welcome to publish copies of my thesis if they agree to not charge a commercial excess for distributing said copies, I haven't heard a peep from them. I can't imagine why.
