| Panel | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ||||||||
This page has been created by the Europeana Copyright Community Steering Group. Use it to understand more about the concept of ‘open’, which plays a key role in digital cultural heritage, but has many dimensions. |
| Table of Contents | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
What does ‘open’ mean in a general sense?
The term ‘open’ is used to refer to information and tools which are accessible and reusable to a large extent. In a general sense, when these materials are marked as ‘open’ anyone is free to access, use, modify and share them for any purpose, subject, at most, to measures that preserve provenance and openness.
...
The following questions focus on the areas of openness that are most relevant to the cultural heritage sector, namely open GLAM or open content and open data. As a general rule, for content to qualify as being ‘open’, it must be freely accessible as well as available for any reuse purpose, including commercial use and modification.
...
What does ‘open access’ mean?
The term ‘open access’ has a specific context compared to other movements. Originally, the idea of Open Access (OA) as conceived by the 2002 Budapest Declaration and the Berlin and 2003 Bethesda Declarations, which referred to:
[T]he free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Thus, originally ‘open access’, in its definition, involved free reuse.
...
Other EU acts regard ‘open access’ as a tool to only secure free availability of research results, in the sense that research outputs cannot be subjected to paywalled platforms, with no requirement as to the reuse conditions of the outputs. According to the Regulation (EU) 2021/695 establishing Horizon Europe – the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, as well as the Horizon Europe General Model Grant Agreement - ‘open access’ refers to ‘online access, free of charge to the end user, to research outputs’ whereas the regime of subsequent use of research results, such as scientific publications or data, is called ‘reuse’. In the field of academic publishing the colour coded types of Open Access such as ‘Green’, ‘Gold’, ‘Platinum’, ‘Hybrid OA’ etc. refer only to the way the content was made available to the public (and to who is paying for the publications to be made accessible without a paywall).
...
What do open GLAM and open content mean?
Open GLAM refers to the movement in the cultural heritage sector that seeks to develop and adopt principles to make creative works, heritage, data and knowledge, available online for reuse using open licences or public domain tools. From a legal perspective this implies no licences or other legal frameworks (such as copyright, data protection, cultural heritage, archaeological or archival laws) impose restrictions on modifications and commercial reuse. This means that, to be open, content can still be protected by copyright but it must be made available by the cultural heritage organisation under terms that permit access, commercial use and modification.
...
For more information, check our page on Open and Reusable Cultural Heritage and read our Public Domain Charter.
...
What does open data mean?
Oen data is data that is accessible, usable, modifiable and exploitable, and can be shared by anyone for any purpose.
...
For example, in 2019 the European Commission adopted the use of CC BY 4.0 and CC0 1.0 for sharing information. At the national level, governments have been relying on the same or similar standards to release public sector information.
...
What are the FAIR principles, and how do they link to open data?
Open data often involves a strong technological dimension, such as the need to make data machine-readable, or to structure the data so that it can be linked with other data (linked open data). Thus, the requirements associated with opening data to the public cover not only legal, but also technical considerations. A term that is closely linked to open data is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), which is widely used in the scientific world for research data. While FAIR principles and sub-principles include openness, they go further by specifically focusing on improving the accessibility and usability of data, without necessarily requiring openness in the broader research methodology. The FAIR principles do not explicitly address legal aspects such as licensing, leaving it to external considerations. FAIR also relates to broader concepts to openness in research, including methods, publications, licensing, community engagement and ethics.
...
To read more about the topic, check the page Europeana and the FAIR principles for research data and the Global Indigenous Data Alliance’s website on how to #BeFAIRandCARE.
...
Is all content made available online ‘open’?
Digital access allows someone to view a work. Being ‘open’ allows people to lawfully use materials and the knowledge they contain.
...
For example, video content on YouTube is available online for viewing. However, most YouTube content (in common with much of the content that’s publicly available on the web) is not truly ‘open’ for lawful reuse, remixing or sharing.
...
Why is some content ‘open’ and some not?
Content may not be available for reuse for any number of valid reasons.
...
However, there are some occasions in which the ‘closing’ (as opposed to ‘opening’) of content is not valid. For example, some cultural heritage institutions want to control how the works in their collections are used by others. Many do this by claiming there is a new copyright protection in the faithful digitisation of a public domain work which justifies ‘closing’ the work, even in cases where copyright protection does not arise. In these cases, any licence - whether closed or open - that limits use on the basis of copyright will be unenforceable. It may be worth questioning such restrictions in order to determine whether they are justifiable.
...
Is it appropriate for some materials to remain ‘closed’?
As a starting point, the EU and other similar copyright regimes plan for all works to eventually become ‘open’ by entering the public domain.
...
Even then, in the context of cultural heritage, it is necessary for cultural heritage institutions to explore ways to make the works that they hold available to the greatest extent possible by exploring options such as clear warnings or contextual clarifications, access restrictions, or the anonymisation or pseudonymisation of certain types of personal data.
...
Can content move from being ‘closed’ to ‘open’ or vice versa?
Content can become more open. For example, copyright eventually expires in copyright protected works. Additionally, a copyright holder can decide at any time to apply an open licence to the work, or even a more permissive open licence than originally selected.
However, with respect to Creative Commons licences and similar statements, once a work is published under a licence it cannot be revoked or made more restrictive, such as by applying a closed licence to materials that were previously released under an open licence.
...
What are open licences? Are all Creative Commons licences open?
Open licences are tools that provide permissions to everyone in the world to use and modify copyright-protected materials for any purpose, provided that some obligations are met. Examples include some of the Creative Commons licences and open source licences (e.g. MIT GPLv3, etc.).
...
Materials for which copyright does not arise, or has expired, are also ‘open’ and they may be clearly placed or marked as being public domain, by using the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication or the Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal (PDM). The PDM is not a legally-binding licence, but simply a label to communicate the public domain status of a work that is unequivocally in the public domain.
...
Are Right Statements by the Rights Statements Consortium ‘open’?
The Rights Statements created by the Rights Statements Consortium are a set of labels of the reuse conditions of a work in a standardised form. They refer to copyright limitations, but they also inform users of relevant legal or contractual restrictions.
Because they are labels, the suite of Rights Statements are not legally binding. Where licences are legal tools in the domain of the author/rightsholder serving to grant authorisation to the public for certain uses of the licensed content, rights statements are tools to express information, and not permissions. Unlike licences, such as Creative Commons licences, rights statements do not grant permission to use. Instead, they seek to accurately reflect the copyright status of the work to which they have been applied and communicate the types of use that are already permitted. As a result, they are not necessarily ‘open’.
...
How does the Europeana Initiative promote ‘openness’ of digital cultural heritage in the common European data space for cultural heritage?
http://Europeana.eu provides access to a wide range of digitised cultural heritage from across Europe and beyond. This material is provided to Europeana by a large number of contributing institutions. Europeana strives to make this data available for reuse as much as possible.
...