OpenAttribute Levels Up

The OpenAttribute project, which aims to make it ridiculously simple to give credit for Creative Commons works, is leveling up this week with new plugins for WordPress and Drupal users.

Lots of people choose to share their creative work using a Creative Commons license, but don’t express that choice in the form of CC REL metadata. Without proper metadata, their sharing preferences are unknown to search engines, and it’s harder for users to give proper attribution. OpenAttribute is about making attribution easier: for creators, for users, for librarians, for everyone. By making attribution easier, we hope to encourage more CC licensed works, more machine readability, and grow the Open Educational Resources movement. And, hey, it’s the right thing to do!

The first stop on this journey was to create browser plugins for Firefox, Chrome, and Opera that display an icon whenever a CC-licensed object is present in a web page. But that required site operators to include the metadata in their pages, which wasn’t always easy.

Now, the OpenAttribute team of volunteers is shipping plugins for WordPress and Drupal that make adding CC REL metadata to posts a breeze. Give them a shot and let us know if you find any bugs.

The team has been laser focused on making simple software. But the software is just a tool to advance the mission. We’re interested in working on educational resources, direct outreach to cultural institutions, and other tools to expose CC sharing preferences to users and search engines. If you think you can help, get in touch!

Update: see Molly’s post on the new WordPress plugin.