As most of us know, Global Voices content is frequently republished by other organisations and individuals. We allow, and in fact encourage, this because it furthers our mission of amplifying information about topics, people and places that are underrepresented or mis-represented in international mainstream media.
When people contact us about republishing our work, we direct them to our Republishing Guidelines [1] page. We recently updated the page to make the guidelines clearer, but we’ve also added a section called “Contributing to Global Voices and Creative Commons” that offers further clarification about our republishing process and what it means for GV contributors.
If you’re new to the GV Community, or unfamiliar with Creative Commons licensing and how it works, we encourage you to review the updated Republishing Guidelines [1] page.
Our Creative Commons [2] license is the mechanism that allows people to republish our work without having to ask us for permission every time they want to use, for example, one of our stories. Creative Commons [3] is a copyright licensing regime that allows publishers and creators to apply to their work a license that outlines the ways their work can be reused.
Many bloggers publish their work under Creative Commons licenses, as do photographers who upload images to platforms such as Flickr and Wikimedia Commons. Some governments also use Creative Commons licenses to make certain of their materials more easily shareable.
All Global Voices’ work is currently published under a https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ [4] license, which allows users to freely republish and adapt our stories and other content, on condition that they credit us in the way we ask them to.
The fact that we allow others to adapt, transform or remix our work may seem radical, but it is especially important for GV because translating a text is considered a form of adaptation.
The license also makes it simpler for republishers to alter GV content to bring it in line with their style norms—just as we do with content from our republication partners.
By requiring that all Global Voices content that is republished carries a notice at the top of the article stating that the item was originally published by GV, plus a link back to the original item, we protect ourselves and our reputation.
If after reading the updated Republishing Guidelines [1] you have any questions, please reach out to any member of the core team.
Thank you for your contributions to GV!