The rise and rise of Creative Commons: Over 1.2M CC Licensed Scholarly Articles | PLOS OpensPLOS Opens

"In our call to the STM Association to withdraw their model licenses we drew attention to the fact that Creative Commons licenses are a de facto global standard. But sometimes it is claimed that (as the STM Association did in their response) that CC licenses are somehow “not designed” for scholarly communications, or 'not proven' in our space. We thought it might be useful to get some data on just how many CC licensed peer reviewed articles are out there. This turns out to be a non-trivial exercise but I think it’s feasible to come up with a reasonable lower bound. The too-long didn’t-read version: there are at least 1.2M CC licensed scholarly articles in the wild, with over 720,000 of them being licensed CC BY. Our first call is the Directory of Open Access Journals. The DOAJ, alongside its listing of journals also has the opportunity for providing article metadata, including the default license for the journal. At the search page there is an option to limit the search to articles and if you then click on the licenses selector tab you can get the number of articles registered under different CC licenses. When I looked this gave around 547,138 CC BY licensed articles, 311,956 CC BY-NC articles and so on to give a total of just over one million CC licensed articles in total ..."