Digital guide: working with open licences/Benefits of open licences

Open licences and public domain dedications expand access to heritage and enable new, innovative and entrepreneurial uses of your digital outputs.

Your outputs can be connected with other open content or used to make entirely new works. This ensures the widest possible number of people can benefit from your organisation’s work.

Public benefits

Public benefits might include:

• Schools and universities using your materials in their educational resources.
• Other organisations connecting their digital resources with your materials or developing new services for the heritage sector around your digital outputs.
• Millions of users engaging with your materials through open knowledge platforms like Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and Wikidata.
• Citizen science and volunteer engagement using your materials to generate new knowledge.
• Scholars and engineers using your materials to innovate in AI, machine learning, computer vision and computational research.

Organisational benefits

Organisational benefits might include:

• More public engagement in line with your organisation’s missions.
• Bringing heritage to the foreground because more collections can be viewed and engaged with online.
• Creative reuse and remixing of your materials by the public.
• More media coverage and academic and public interest.
• Increased traffic to websites, digital platforms and interactions on social media.
• Cost savings associated with rights and reproduction overhead through self-service media delivery.

Examples of creative reuse and remixing

"Isn’t it right that we do what we say we do, reflect Birmingham to the world, and the world to Birmingham? Our audience isn’t only locally in Birmingham. We want to share things worldwide; the benefits should be global."

Linda Spurdle, Digital Development Manager at Birmingham Museums Trust

In 2018, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery freely shared their public domain artwork collections with the public as CC0. They also collaborated with artist Cold War Steve and the collective Black Hole Club to remix the collections.

Cold War Steve later shared his own creations as CC0 and encouraged the public to make installations of his artworks through the ‘You, Me & Cold War Steve’ international exhibition project.

Welcome to the open movement

Connect with others

Almost 900 cultural institutions, organisations and universities have released digital outputs under open licences or to the public domain. You can see the ongoing list of these organisations, including those in the UK, on the Open GLAM Survey managed by Douglas McCarthy and Andrea Wallace. (CC BY)

See it for yourself

Give it Away to Get Rich is a video by Effie Kapsalis (Senior Program Officer for Digital Strategy, Smithsonian Institution) summarising her research on the benefits cultural organisations have seen after releasing high-quality images to the public domain. (2016)

Hear it for yourself

Interviews with Linda Spurdle (Digital Development Manager, Birmingham Museums Trust) on the Digital Works podcast (2020) and with Douglas McCarthy (2020, CC BY) highlight the exciting opportunities and benefits following the release of the public domain collection as CC0.

Keep passing it on

The UNESCO open Educational Resources website has reports, openly-licensed materials and other useful tools for preparing your project to be reused by the public in a range of exciting ways. It includes how to promote your materials for educational reuse.