commercialisation, and their absence can have even more of a positive impact. GLAMS remain free to commercialise collections in the public domain and form commercial partnerships around them, which remain desirable because of the expertise and brand value carried by the GLAM. The main difference is that everyone else can use the public domain too. According to one participant, "Open access is not just good economics. It's the right thing to do."
5.2.6. What does open access mean to UK GLAMS?
The qualitative and quantitative research reveals a complex picture of open GLAM policy and practice in the UK. In general, this reflects outdated approaches to open access, with little progress since the 2015 Striking the Balance Report and an overall imbalance across the sector in terms of whose voices shape the debate.
Across the UK, the prevailing approach is to provide digital access to view GLAM content, rather than open access to reuse GLAM content. In the UK sample of 195 GLAMS, this materialized as follows:
- 144 or 73.8% of GLAMS provide digital access to view GLAM content. As a majority approach to open GLAM, 108 GLAMS retain all rights in content and 36 GLAMS publish content under closed licences prohibiting commercial reuse.
- 50 or 25.6% of GLAMS provide open access to reuse GLAM content. As a majority approach to open GLAM, 7 GLAMS publish all eligible collections under open licences (1) and public domain tools (6). The remaining 43 GLAMS publish some eligible collections under open licences and public domain tools.
- A total of 6 GLAMS comply with UK law. These include: Birmingham Museums Trust, Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru (National Library of Wales), Newcastle Libraries, Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove, Wellcome Collection and York Museums Trust.[1] Given the UK sample included all known instances of open GLAM participation, this number is representative of the entire UK GLAM sector.
- Only 2 national collections have published large volumes of open collections.
Digital access to view content is a standard open access approach in scholarly publishing. Further distinctions are made between Green and Gold open access, which reflects the reuse parameters of the content itself and may be conditioned upon release fees paid by the author, rather than by individual users. However, there is a huge difference between scholarly publishing of new research articles and GLAM publishing of digitised public domain collections: rights undoubtedly exist in the scholarly content published via the platform. Moreover, even in scholarly publishing, attitudes are increasingly shifting to international standards that qualify "open access" upon commercial reuse of content.[2]
The data shows a strong desire to engage in open access, whatever that means for an institution. Where commercialisation is prioritised, GLAMS commonly apply versions of the Creative Commons NC licences to enable public reuse while ensuring commercialisation proceeds through the GLAM
- ↑ This number could be extended to seven GLAMS to include the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which publishes archival images of objects as CC BY. Copyright is more likely to arise in these images considering objects are three-dimensional (e.g., coins) and arranged on a black background with other elements, leaving greater scope for creative input.
- ↑ See Section 2.
