The right to read.
The right to reuse.

At Zimmer Biomet, the medical technology company, Jamie Hullinger had a peculiar scaling problem. As a solo research librarian, she needed to make herself useful to a workforce spread across the world. The information existed. The people needed it. Getting the two together, with the right permissions attached, was another matter.

That is a useful place to begin with Copyright Clearance Center. Its name suggests a counter where someone stamps a form. Its business is closer to the plumbing behind research: the article, the payment, the permission, the record of what someone may do next.

A photocopier problem, repeated

CCC began in 1978, when the disruptive technology was a photocopier. A machine could reproduce a publisher’s work much faster than people could negotiate permission for each copy. Collective licensing offered a practical arrangement: gather rights from participating owners and make them available through a common system.

The mechanism still matters. A publisher has something other people want to use. An organization wants predictable permissions without managing a separate negotiation every time. CCC sits between them. Its licenses are voluntary and non-exclusive, leaving room for direct agreements.

Now replace the photocopier with an AI application. The machine changes. The administrative mismatch remains. CCC’s bet is that easier copying makes an organized permissions market more useful.

The librarian is the bottleneck

RightFind Enterprise brings discovery, document delivery, subscriptions, open access sources, and internal collections into a research workflow. In CCC’s Zimmer Biomet case study, Hullinger describes using it to centralize resources and support collaboration. The point is organizational: a small information team can make its services easier for colleagues to find and use.

Sun Chemical faced a related problem across decentralized research operations. Its intellectual property team needed to support access while handling copyright and training across countries. The company adopted CCC licensing and RightFind. CCC’s case study reports a greater than 200% increase in employees requesting content after launch. That measures participation, not a proven increase in inventions.

And the software has a human backstop. CCC’s Advanced Research Services specialists locate difficult documents when automated delivery cannot finish the job. Even in a business built around databases, somebody sometimes has to go looking.

Permission has a price

CCC earns money through annual licenses, individual permissions, software, content services, data, and professional work. For the corporate Annual Copyright License, its published explanation bases fees on company size and primary industry, using expected content use. A customer buying a specific permission instead pays for a particular work and use.

The useful comparison is total administrative effort. Direct publisher agreements may suit a narrow collection. Research Solutions’ Article Galaxy competes in literature acquisition and management. The UK’s Copyright Licensing Agency offers collective permissions within its own coverage. These choices overlap in tasks, without making their rights or territories interchangeable.

CCC’s distinctive combination is the license alongside the tools that help people apply it. A permission sitting in procurement’s files does little for a scientist trying to send an article to a colleague.

The AI project changed. The contract did not.

In remarks published by WIPO in 2025, CEO Tracey Armstrong described customers struggling with narrowly written AI licenses. Projects evolved. Teams sometimes had to return to rightsholders because the new approach fell outside the agreement. The constraint arrived when experimentation met the contract.

CCC added internal-only AI reuse rights to its corporate Annual Copyright License in July 2024. It announced an AI Systems Training License in March 2025 for organizations training systems for external uses. Those are different destinations for content, with different permissions needs.

“CCC is pro-copyright and pro-AI.”

Tracey Armstrong / March 2026

In March 2026, CCC also announced pay-per-use AI rights, starting with summarization. Its higher education license added internal AI reuse rights effective July 1, 2026. The campus expansion addresses uses such as prompting, chatbots, and research support using covered, lawfully acquired content.

The boundary is consequential. An internal-use license does not automatically authorize a customer-facing model. Nor does reuse permission supply the underlying article. Teams still need appropriate access and must check participating works and terms.

The back office of open access

CCC also works on the publishing side of the transaction. RightsLink for Scientific Communications manages publication charges and institutional open access agreements. A paper may be free to read while its funding arrangements remain complicated.

Knowing which institution an author belongs to helps those arrangements work. CCC acquired organization-identifier provider Ringgold in 2022, after using its data in RightsLink. The deal’s terms were undisclosed. In May 2026, RightsLink added self-service affiliation discounting and expanded agreement reporting. These are modest-sounding improvements to jobs that somebody otherwise has to do by hand.

Put the check where the work happens

The lesson readers can copy is concrete: identify the repeated interruption, then move the answer into the workflow. CCC’s DistillerSR integration lets evidence-review teams order articles within their review platform. Its Get It Now service brings purchases of unsubscribed articles into academic library systems.

This approach depends on fit. A work outside the repertory, an uncovered use, or a project needing extensive bespoke rights can still require separate clearance. Where a use is already permitted by an applicable exception, an existing agreement, or an open license, another permission may be unnecessary. The valuable habit is to check before buying.

Back at the research desk, the desired outcome is unglamorous: the colleague gets the article and knows what can happen next. CCC has built its place in the market around making that ordinary moment easier.