museums’ abilities to recover costs, their funding positions and how they respond to operational demands.[1] These concerns, no matter how pressing, cannot justify licensing fees and business models built upon copyright where no copyright arises in reproduction media.
2.2.4. Intersection with obligations on public bodies
National collections belong to the public and fall under various Acts of Parliament, like the Museums and Galleries Act 1992,[2] the National Heritage Act 1983[3] and/or GLAM-specific legislation like the British Museum Act 1963[4] or National Library of Scotland Act 1925.[5] GLAMs hold collections in trust for the public. Whether reproduction media generated around publicly-owned collections in the public domain also belong to the public and/or must be provided free of charge depends on how a GLAM (or an Act of Parliament) defines its public task and which documents fall within it, in addition to how a GLAM interprets copyright law.[6] Section 4 details examples of public tasks that make distinctions between digital surrogates and other reproduction media, including between low and high resolution images for the purposes of performing the task versus the purposes of commercialisation.[7]
Many national, regional and local GLAMs frame open access as balancing income generation against “free access” or “giving collections away for free” as mutually exclusive approaches. However, more than one participant mentioned the weight that national voices carry as clear holdouts on the copyright question, preventing an overall shift forward for the UK GLAM sector. Reasons for this are discussed in Section 2.4.
2.2.5. Funders and open licensing requirements
Major funders of national and international projects have adopted open licensing requirements at increasing rates, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and the Arcadia Fund. Initiatives like Plan S and the new UKRI policy require publicly funded projects to publish research articles, monographs and the underlying data in open access so it may be accessed, shared and reused.[8] In the UK, two major funders operate open licensing requirements as a condition of funding.
In September 2020, The National Lottery Heritage Fund adopted a broad policy extending to all project outputs. The Heritage Fund’s open licensing requirement aligns with the UK IPO guidance and new EU laws discussed below.[9] Projects funded after 16 September 2020 are required to publish original materials using the CC BY licence (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International) and dedicate all code, metadata and similar materials to the public domain using the CC0 tool (Creative Commons 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication♀). The guidelines state 2D and 3D photographic reproductions and scans of public domain works are not ‘original’ and must be published using the CC0 public domain dedication. The requirement applies only to media generated
- ↑ https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/abdab600-79f4-4962-aaf6-1d9b76c5d442?in=16:47:35, transcript on file with the author
- ↑ GLAMs include: British Library, British Museum, Imperial War Museum, National Gallery, National Galleries Scotland, National Library of Scotland, National Maritime Museum, National Museums of Scotland, National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, Science Museum, Tate Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum and the Wallace Collection. Museums and Galleries Act 1992, c. 44
- ↑ National Heritage Act 1983, c. 47
- ↑ British Museum Act 1963, c. 24
- ↑ National Library of Scotland Act 1925, c. 73
- ↑ The Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015, No. 1415
- ↑ Discussed in Section 4.2.9.
- ↑ https://www.coalition-s.org; https://www.ukri.org/our-work/supporting-healthy-research-and-innovation-culture/open-research/open-access-policies-review/
- ↑ https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/good-practice-guidance/digital-guide-working-open-licences
