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 increasingly released to the public domain by other GLAMs. As one participant commented, “You can’t compete with free.”

Conversations revealed that commercialisation and guardianship factors influence decisions to claim copyright and/or provide digital access, rather than a legal assessment of the ‘originality’ of reproduction media required to attract new rights. Staff expressed concerns that fiscal assessments are often made based on potential commercial viability, rather than any immediate or concrete plans to commercialise collections. Desires to retain control or ensure attribution to the GLAM or source creator also inform these decisions.

The research revealed many examples of commercialisation goals and/or partnerships impacting what gets digitised, used for research projects and published online. In the aggregate, institutional decisions that shape what appears in the public-facing collection can render collections relatively invisible, both digitally and for research, and impact public perceptions around value and cultural relevance.

There is no consensus in the UK GLAM sector on what to do, nor is there any consensus about open access means, or should mean. Instead, GLAMs generally respond to open access with individualised strategies that frame open access as a balance against control, income generation and commercialisation goals. This results in a sector that overwhelmingly takes a default approach to making new copyright claims in the reproduction media generated around public domain collections.

Across the UK, only six institutions were found to comply with the IPO’s Copyright Notice by adopting policies to not claim new rights in digitised public domain collections published online: Birmingham Museums Trust, Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru (National Library of Wales), Newcastle Libraries, Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove, Wellcome Collection and York Museums Trust. Only the Royal Pavilion & Museums Trust, Brighton & Hove expressly references the UK IPO’s interpretation of copyright law. All appear to hold back high-resolution assets for commercialisation.

Globally, at least 1,208 institutions and organisations release some or all eligible data using open licences and public domain tools as of 7 October 2021. Of these, the UK comprises 80 or 6.6% of open GLAM instances, and ties for third place with Sweden (80 or 6.6%) behind the United States (292 instances or 24.2%) and Germany (157 instances or 13.0%). UK GLAMs have released at least 10,487,115 open and public domain assets (14.8% of the global total volume) to a variety of platforms online. A Culture of Copyright