Digital guide: working with open licences/Examples in practice

There are many ways to cite a work with the open licence or public domain dedication. Although the CC0 tool does not legally require users to attribute the source, providing a citation will enable them to do so more easily. This section provides examples in practice by UK organisations.

Images

Wellcome Collection

The Wellcome Collection makes a range of original materials available under the CC BY licence.

Purple medicine jar. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

Birmingham Museums Trust releases images of public domain works for reuse under the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication tool via the Digital Image Resource platform.

Certificate of thanks, Illustrated by I. E. Harper. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, CC0 1.0.

Data, 3D data and datasets

Some projects will create datasets, metadata and code. In these cases, consider drafting a metadata specific policy that makes clear users may access and reuse these materials made available as CC0.

University of Dundee

The University of Dundee Museum, the Scottish Maritime Museum and the Science Museum Group release 3D models CC0 via Sketchfab.

Natural History Museum

The Natural History Museum makes high resolution images and datasets available for download through the Data Portal.

Sharing your materials

Once your project materials are ready to be shared, you should consider which platform you will use to deposit your materials. Digital outputs need to be publicly available for at least five years from the project completion date.

Explore your options

The British Library uses GitHub to release data CC0. The National Library of Wales has converted its metadata collection to Wikidata, which requires data to be released CC0 for platform integration.

Other organisations, like the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the National Library of Scotland release materials and metadata through their collections integration with Europeana. Newcastle Libraries uses Flickr to release images CC BY.

Many organisations also openly release their Application Programming Interface (APIs). Open APIs enable software to integrate CC0 metadata and run commands in order to create new products and applications around open materials.

Support good citation practice

You can support good citation practices by providing the credit you would like to accompany the works as they are reused. Users can copy and paste this information easily.

Update your website’s copyright policy or terms of use to convey materials produced with funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund are available for reuse.

The Annex section of this guide has sample terms that can be copied and modified for your website policy.

If you find anything in this resource helpful, you are welcome to repurpose the text in your own policy or rights management documentation.

We would appreciate acknowledgement by a credit similar to the one below:

Some of the guidance in [this resource] has been repurposed from ‘Working with open licences: a guide for projects’, Andrea Wallace and Mathilde Pavis (2021), supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, CC BY 4.0.

More on copyright and open licensing

OpenGLAM Medium

The OpenGLAM Medium has many articles on how to implement open access, like this series by Anne Young (Director of Legal Affairs & Intellectual Property at Newfields). Articles are published CC BY or CC0, which means they can be translated into other languages for greater impact.

Copyright User

CopyrightUser.org is an online resource to make UK copyright law more accessible to anyone who makes or encounters copyright protected works. It includes guidance on how to understand, license and respect the rights recognised by UK copyright law. (CC BY, 2020)

GLAM3D.org

GLAM3D.org is an online resource for anyone from beginner to expert level on how to create, manage and release a 3D open access program. (CC BY, 2020)

Copyright Cortex

The Copyright Cortex is an online resource dedicated to copyright law and digital cultural heritage. It was developed to provide cultural organisations with information and expert commentary on how copyright law affects the creation and management of digital heritage. The website contains an ongoing catalogue of research, resources and evidence, and an open access text on UK copyright law and heritage management called Copyright 101. (CC BY-NC)

RightsStatements.org

The RightsStatements.org Guidelines for Applying the Rights Statements provides more practical advice on how to embed and display the rights statements with digital objects. (CC0 1.0)

The CC Certificate

Learn more about Creative Commons licences and tools through their open access certificate programme.