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 GLAMs have released at least 70,931,426 open and public domain assets to a variety of platforms online. This number includes all known assets released under both open licences and public domain tools.

 UK GLAMs have released at least 10,487,115 open and public domain assets (14.8% of all global open assets) to a variety of platforms online. Of these, 7 GLAMs were identified as contributing 10,409,004 or 99.3% of all UK contributions. These include the Natural History Museum (7,131,263), the British Library (1,187,746), the Portable Antiquities Scheme (1,038,191), Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (595,140), Wellcome Collection (387,228), York Museums Trust (40,426), and the Royal Pavilion & Museums Trust, Brighton & Hove (28,010).

 (12.4% of UK assets) are public domain compliant. After isolating the British Library’s contribution of 1,187,746 (90.9% of UK public domain compliant assets), this number comes to 119,275 assets (9.1% of UK public domain compliant assets) that have been contributed by 31 UK GLAMs.

Data is also collected on entry fees for Museums and Galleries who publish all eligible collections to the public domain. Data is not collected for Libraries and Archives, as they rarely charge for entry.

 143 Museums and Galleries make all eligible data available under open licences and public domain tools. Of these, almost half (68 or 47.6%) provide free entry onsite and free reuse online: 25 are in the United States, 17 are in Sweden and 9 are in France (representing 51 of 68 GLAMs). Distribution is shown in the figure 14.

Some of these organisations charge service fees for new image creation or delivery and/or continue commercialising high resolution versions. However, they also publish collections online for any reuse purpose, including commercial reuse.

Data is limited to the fee charged, rather than actual fees received or income generated from visitors onsite. It suggests the ability to charge for admission is neither a driver for adopting open access, nor a source of revenue that offsets any loss of income previously generated by exclusive control and licensing. Museums with higher entry fees, like the Rijksmuseum (€20), are the exception.

 National Museums and Galleries in the UK must provide free onsite access to the permanent collection as a condition of government Grant-in-aid funding. This requirement does not extend to open access to digital collections online. As discussed in Section 4., the National Portrait Gallery references this obligation in their policy and explains that licensing fees support the Gallery’s ability to provide free entry and care for its collections. Only one UK Gallery (and Museum) provides free entry onsite and free reuse of public domain collections online as a matter of policy (i.e., all eligible data - public domain compliant): Birmingham Museums Trust.

A Culture of Copyright