Content licensing in multilateral institutions

Multilateral institutions, funded by taxpayers around the world, generally have permissions statements which are less restrictive compared to full "all Rights reserved," but not open and compatible with the new era of knowledge sharing through open licenses.

Publications generally have:

• Restrictions on how much can be used (allowing extracts).
• Restrictions on commercial use (unlike the CC-BY-SA license used by Wikipedia, Appropedia and others - see Non-commercial clause for the reasons to allow commercial use).
• Ambiguity over whether derivate works are allowed.

Any one of these restrictions make the work incompatible with Appropedia's license.

All require attribution, which is compatible with any Creative Commons license.

Examples are:

• World Bank: World Bank Publications: Help/FAQ - "The World Bank welcomes requests for permissions to excerpt or photocopy"
• United Nations: e.g.
  • United Nations Publications - Rights and Permissions - gives no rights beyond regular copyright.
  • United Nations Development Programme - Copyright & Terms of Use: "Extracts of the information in the Web site may be reviewed, reproduced or translated for research or private study but not for sale or for use in conjunction with commercial purposes."
• OECD: OECD Publishing - Rights and Permissions - "you can include excerpts from OECD publications, databases and multimedia products in your own documents, presentations, blogs, websites and teaching materials... All requests for public or commercial use and translation rights should be submitted to [email address]."