the policy’s framing. Others do explain open access but limit its scope.
The Ashmolean Museum makes an open access commitment in its ‘Digital strategy’, which includes as its vision the goal of embracing “the opportunities offered by digital to democratise access to collections, eliminating geographic, cultural and economic boundaries”. The policy does not consider that copyright in digital surrogates and data may frustrate these goals by erecting new boundaries that are geographic (e.g., UK copyright law), cultural (e.g., Museum oversight around reuse) and economic (e.g., licensing fees to access and reuse images). Instead it focuses on digital access (rather than open access) around an ambition “to create full machine-readable metadata and digital surrogates of our unique collections and make them available and discoverable online, and to preserve and safeguard them for future generations” (italics added). To fulfil this, the Museum will “[o]ptimise access to the collections for digital teaching and research” and “[u]tilise the collections to enhance public participation and engage new audiences locally, nationally and internationally”. To support this, the Museum will “[c]reate an efficient sustainable model for preserving and managing the collections” and “develop commercial strategies and partnerships, where appropriate, to grow income streams and ensure the financial sustainability of our operations”.[1] The ‘Terms of Use’ reserve all rights in images of collections, galleries and buildings and require “© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford” to accompany any reuse for non-commercial and educational purposes only.[2]
Others define ‘open access’ around information and research, rather than collections and digital surrogates. The Science Museum Group clarifies its goal to “enable audience’s [sic] reuse of images” is achieved through the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence. By contrast the CC BY 3.0 licence “applies to ‘open access’ content such as the Science Museum Group Journal” and the CC0 “public domain attribution” (italics added, as this is a public domain dedication and does not require attribution) applies to “datasets such as the collection metadata”.[3] In the ‘Guidance on reuse’ document accompanying the public task, the notes read: “The Science Museum Journal is inside the public task and generally available for free reuse with attribution (“Open access”) on Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY.”[4]
The National Portrait Gallery and the British Library reference public funding as supporting open access goals. In the ‘Open Access Policy’, the Library includes a statement “in support of Open Access to research that has been funded from the UK public purse”, which goes on to convey this position is specifically in reference to research.[5] The Gallery frames public funding and its impact not within open access, but rather with respect to “non-commercial research”. Because this is research “whose objective is to put new ideas into the public domain for public benefit and at no cost to the end user”, the Gallery explains “[i]t will therefore normally be financed from public or charitable funds”.[6] This statement is made in the Academic Licence the Gallery supports for the purposes of allowing reuse for non-commercial purposes, rather than the Gallery’s policy on copyright and open access and how public funding impacts its own activities.
The Fleming Collection limits its commitment to providing “online access” to “as many of the works
- ↑ Digital strategy, 2. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (All rights reserved)
- ↑ Terms of Use, 2. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (All rights reserved)
- ↑ Creative Commons, 51. Science Museum Group (Closed licences)
- ↑ Guidance on reuse, Public task, 51. Science Museum Group (Closed licences)
- ↑ Open Access Policy, 7. British Library (Some eligible data - no new rights)
- ↑ Academic licence details, 39. The National Portrait Gallery Academic Licence (Closed licences)
