This call for open licensing was given for authors and publishers during the Vijayawada Book Festival in 2025. For the Telugu version, click here.
Knowledge is a public good which should be accessible for everyone. In the digital age, availability of information over the internet leads to better access and progress. Open licensing is one of the best ways to go ahead for this to be achieved.
What is Open Licensing?
“Open Licensing” is a type of licensing where a creator willingly grants permission for others to access, use, modify, and distribute their work with minimal to no restrictions, essentially allowing anyone to freely utilize the content while usually requiring attribution to the original author, as commonly seen with Creative Commons licenses; it essentially means making your work publicly available for wider use and adaptation without needing explicit permission each time.
Use cases and how it benefits you
- Content of books will be searchable over the internet with unicode.
- Providing better reach for your works over the public internet.
- Attribution if anyone uses your information, citation will be given wherever used.
- It gives you rights if someone misuses beyond the terms of license.
- Books and other literary works which are no longer in print can be brought into better access and will be very useful for researchers, students, journalists and readers.
- You can still sell your books, e-books and also print and publish any openly licensed works.
- Conversion to Unicode can be done by the community on Wikisource or Internet Archive using OCR and proofreading.
Use-cases and how it benefits the society at large
- Availability of knowledge for the general public through Wikipedia/Internet archive/Google books
- AI/Gen AI training can be done where GPTs will answer referencing from the published books/articles
- Historical preservation and access to information
- Organized Data collection where anyone across the world can access information about books, literature. Ex: I can list books of a particular author or publisher during 1960-70 under “fiction” genre with a character named “Rajesh” with a minimum of 100 pages. Hobbyists/Journalists/Researchers etc will be hugely benefited from your books and refer to them in their works.
- Every Digital Library can maintain copies of your books and your physical sales will increase.
- Wikipedia being one of the largest public knowledge repositories, any internet search first sources information from Wikipedia and Wikisource. To make it work, the works are to be in open licenses so that it can be added to Wikimedia projects.
How to Begin: Create a declaration letter with a list of publications you wish to release under an open license.
FAQ:
- Who are We? Swecha AP is a Not-For-Profit organization working to improve access of knowledge to everyone. We advocate and promote Open Knowledge Systems and Free and Open Source technologies. We set up community digital libraries , student clubs, and
- Can We Sell After Re-licensing? You can publish, sell, copy your and others open licensed content in online and physical stores or make it available on your or any website.
- How much process will it take? Once a declaration letter with list of publications is published, we can assist you with uploading to various sites like Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource, Internet Archive.
For more info, reach out to us at commons@swechaap.org