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The pandemic has resulted in doors shut, staff furloughed and made redundant, and knowledge and expertise lost, with priorities shifting to institutional survival. Many international exhibitions and partnerships have been cancelled or are no longer feasible. These and other conditions are impacting how GLAMs commercialise digital collections. Any decision to forego licensing revenue, however small, is made more difficult by pressures from legislators and Governments to generate income, no matter the business model. As a result, GLAM staff are working under significant and increasing pressures to achieve what they can with open access with the limited support and power available to them. Participants in this research unanimously framed these conditions as significant barriers to open access goals.

Complicated laws lead to complicated outcomes for GLAMs, and their publics. Legal advice is generally perceived to be expensive and inaccessible by GLAMs without in-house counsel. As a result, many GLAMs rely on each other for interpreting and applying laws that can be rife with grey areas. This is made more difficult when legal areas converge around collections, like copyright, contract, obligations for public bodies, privacy and data protection. These variables translate to a range of public-facing policies on the reuse of digital collections that are often overbroad, unenforceable or claim rights far beyond the protections available under UK law.

The research revealed deeply embedded practices of risk aversion, even around public domain materials that should pose little to no risk for digitisation and public reuse. As one participant framed it, “the natural position is one of saying no before yes”. For a wide range of materials, gaps in information, expertise or the financial resources necessary to clear copyright and/or determine the materials that are in the public domain prevent GLAMs from making such conclusions. The result is that copyright is assumed to subsist in far more materials than it should. Risk aversion also materialises in public-facing policies, which reveal more about individual GLAM needs and fears than how users can access and reuse digital collections.

Data strongly suggests commercial licensing services are unsustainable and have been for some time. At an individual level, (many) GLAMs bear the costs of maintaining their own commercial licensing system. In the aggregate, this amounts to significant costs expended across the sector. Providing the service incurs loss for the majority of UK GLAMs; few are profitable, and those that are, are primarily national museums. These limited income sources also appear to be shrinking. UK GLAMs operate within a global marketplace for image licensing where high-resolution images are A Culture of Copyright