“Watering Place at Marley” by Alfred Sisley, 1875, CC0, Art Institute of Chicago, remixed with “TAROCH balloon” by Creative Commons/Dee Harris, 2025, CC0.
Open Heritage’s Untapped Potential
From sparking creativity to fueling education and scientific research, open heritage generates positive ripple effects across society. Yet, only about 1% of cultural heritage institutions openly share their heritage collections. Incorrect copyright claims over digital reproductions, technological locks, prohibitive access fees, lack of sustainable infrastructure, and inconsistent legal frameworks are just some of the barriers that stand in the way of equitable access to heritage. The result is fragmented and fragile access that prevents people from engaging with heritage, our shared resource.
A Momentous Contribution to UNESCO’s Efforts
This launch builds on Creative Commons’ long-standing collaboration with UNESCO, as formalized by our recent recognition as an official partner to UNESCO (consultative status). It is also an answer to the call made by UNESCO at MONDIACULT 2025 — the world’s largest conference on cultural policies — for culture to be treated as a global priority amid mounting geopolitical divides and multiple crises.
Why Sign the Statement?
Signing the Open Heritage Statement is more than symbolic; it is a way for signatories to demonstrate shared commitment, signal broad sectoral consensus to policymakers, and strengthen a global, community-driven movement. Each signature helps build momentum toward an international framework to ensure equitable access to heritage in the digital environment.
Open Heritage Statement Launch Webinar
Creative Commons will host a webinar to mark the launch of the Statement and brief participants on its objectives, impact, and opportunities for engagement.
By signing the Open Heritage Statement today, you add your voice to a global call for equitable access to heritage, helping to lower barriers, stimulate creativity, and preserve our cultural memory for future generations.
“A Turn in the Road” by Alfred Sisley (1873), CC0, Art Institute of Chicago, remixed with “TAROCH balloon” by Creative Commons/Dee Harris, 2025, CC0.
The (Under-Realized) Potential of Open Heritage
To understand our present, we need to know our past: our memories, our history, our heritage. Over the last two decades, pioneers of open heritage — institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Rijksmuseum, Paris Musées, the Smithsonian, and many more — have shown the world the value of sharing digitized public domain collections openly. Taken together, these successes give us a glimpse of what is possible, from sparking new narratives across diverse contexts, nurturing collective memory, advancing digital equity, and inviting people to transform yesterday’s heritage into today’s creativity and tomorrow’s innovation. Their leadership inspired a vision: a future where the world’s heritage is equitably accessible by everyone.
But these success stories of open heritage remain the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of CHIs still face serious obstacles to openly sharing their digital collections and lack the support to open up confidently, be it in Chile, India, Nigeria, or Brazil. Legal uncertainty leading to copyright “anxiety,” fear of lost revenue, resource constraints, economic questions around open licensing, and misconceptions about what “open” really means continue to hold many back. Above all, the absence of international guidance encouraging open policies, tools, and practices puts our shared heritage at risk of being locked away forever. The result is a fragmented global landscape with pockets of equitable access within vast stretches of inaccessibility.
The numbers speak for themselves. The Open GLAM Survey, which has gathered data from nearly 1,700 CHIs across 55 countries, documents close to 100 million openly licensed or public domain digital objects. This reflects the fact that only ~1% of the world’s CHIs have open policies.
The potential of open heritage is enormous, but without a shared international normative framework to support CHIs in going open, this potential will remain unrealized. The need for alignment, across regions, institutions, and states, is urgent.
From Vision to Coalition — A Brief History of TAROCH
Recognizing this gap, CC began convening the global open culture community around a simple but powerful belief: when people can equitably connect with heritage in the digital environment, they can learn from it, build upon it, and keep it alive for future generations. With support from the Arcadia Fund starting in 2021, we published An Agenda for Copyright Reform (2022) and a Call to Action to Policymakers. We organized a Roundtable in Lisbon (2023) to assess global challenges and explore the need for a new UNESCO instrument for open culture. The turning point came in Lisbon in May 2024. Nearly 50 experts, activists, and institutional leaders gathered for the Open Culture Strategic Workshop and together charted a new path toward the official launch of the TAROCH Coalition in November 2024.
TAROCH is now an international coalition of more than 60 organizations across 25 countries. Membership is extensive and diverse, reflecting the global nature of this endeavor. Through international working groups and local advocacy circles, Coalition members collaborate on targeted policy engagement to empower CHIs with shared open standards and clear opportunities for international cooperation.
A Recommendation on Open Heritage, or other standard-setting instrument, would be the next logical step, complementing the existing instruments and catalyzing global cooperation on a key priority for UNESCO: ensuring equitable access to heritage in the digital environment to activate the universal right to participate in cultural life.
What’s Next? Introducing the Open Heritage Statement
Over the past months, the TAROCH Coalition has collaboratively drafted the Open Heritage Statement, turning local efforts into a global call. The Statement is a shared articulation of values, challenges, and priorities to close the global gap in access to heritage. It consists of two parts: a Preamble, situating the issues in context and outlining values and principles; and Articles, proposing policy solutions to lower barriers and unlock the potential of open heritage.
In October, we will publish the Open Heritage Statement and invite governments, institutions, organizations, policymakers, and advocates to sign or support the Statement. By joining our voices under the banner of the Open Heritage Statement, we can raise awareness about the importance of open heritage as a key means to turn the vision of the 2022 Mondiacult Declaration of culture as a global public good into action.
The Statement will be launched publicly during a Creative Commons webinar on Tuesday, 14 October at 14:00 UTC. Register today.
If your institution or organization would like to be part of a global movement that is helping shape the future of open heritage, apply to join the TAROCH Coalition.
Aligned values: The Zulip project values resonate with Creative Commons’ commitments to openness, transparency, and community-driven spaces.
Better features for collaboration: Zulip offers a broad set of tools that make it easier to coordinate across time zones and languages. Its powerful threading system is especially suited to global, distributed communities.
Moving to Zulip is not just a platform change—we are also taking this opportunity to strengthen our outreach and engagement process. We’d like to warmly invite everyone who sees themselves as part of the CC global community to join us on Zulip. This is the first step in fostering broader community collaboration within all of CC’s community spaces.
Join now! To join CC on Zulip , please complete the Creative Commons Community Intake Form. This form will help us ensure a safe, transparent, and welcoming environment.
You may also choose to opt in to our community mailing list.
Step 2 – Review
Applications will be reviewed by the CC team to ensure they meet the above criteria.
Approved applicants will be added to our community list, Zulip (if requested), and the mailing lists (if requested).
Applications that don’t meet the criteria will not be approved.
Transitioning from Slack to Zulip
As we transition away from Slack, we hope that any active Slack users will join us in moving over to Zulip, and we can engage new audiences on this platform.
Timeline
Week of Sept 15: Announce migration to Zulip
people are able to join Zulip
Slack signup closed and redirected to Zulip signup
Weeks of Sept 22 – Oct 6: Weekly reminders
Oct 17: Slack is shutdown
What’s Next
As we’ve been discussing on the blog, the current Creative Commons Global Network (CCGN) membership process has been dormant for a number of years. We want to ensure that our community spaces are welcoming to everyone who sees themselves as part of the CC global community, regardless of existing CCGN membership. This is the first step of many!
We’re excited to take this step together. Zulip will give us a sustainable, values-aligned space to connect, collaborate, and grow as a community. If you are new to Zulip, you can get started with this helpful beginners guide.
Join Zulip now and share what you’ve been working on in the open movement!
“Watering Place at Marley” by Alfred Sisley, 1875, CC0, Art Institute of Chicago, remixed with “TAROCH balloon” by Creative Commons/Dee Harris, 2025, CC0.
Open Heritage and Contemporary Creativity
Apollo or Venus in your living room? This is the proposition made by Denmark’s Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK) upon openly sharing its vast collection of 3D models of sculptures. With SMK’s open files of digital reproductions of sculptures in the public domain, anyone can 3D-print a sculpture of Roman gods Apollo or Venus and use it to create a new object to decorate the living room, among many creative endeavors.
In this blog post, we highlight some examples of the benefits of open heritage and show what becomes possible when barriers are removed and heritage in the public domain is openly accessible.
When cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) like the SMK openly share their public domain collections in the digital environment, their mission to make heritage available to all really comes alive. Open heritage can prompt curiosity, unlock creativity, spark imagination, spur artistic experimentation, and nurture the contemporary art scene. It allows artists, creators, designers and creative entrepreneurs to have a fresh take on our shared heritage. Open heritage is essential if we want people to be able to interrogate humanity’s cultural record, participate in cultural life, and enjoy the arts without barriers and on equitable terms.
Europeana’s GIF IT UP annual competition is another great example of creative remixing and storytelling made possible by open heritage. Every year in October, people from around the globe create new GIFs from openly licensed heritage material and share them with the world.
It is also fascinating to see artist Amy Karle leveraging Smithsonian 3D scans of a fossilized Triceratops skeleton (the first “digital dinosaur”) to create sculptures consisting of “novel evolutionary forms based upon extinct species to explore hypothetical evolutions through technological regeneration.” And for the romantics among us, Germany’s Coding da Vinci produced a playful “dating app” matching users with portrait paintings digitized by the Augustinermuseum (Städtische Museen Freiburg).
Open Heritage’s Ripple Effect Across Society
Increased creativity is not the only benefit of open heritage. In particular, open heritage can also contribute to heritage preservation and increased visibility. For example, in 2021, the Wellcome Collection in the UK announced its images had passed 1.5 billion views on Wikipedia. Open heritage also helps enhance student engagement and learning: the Wikipedia in School project in Denmark integrated open heritage resources directly into school curricula, making education more interactive and culturally relevant. It can also accelerate scientific research, in particular to address global challenges like climate change. Indeed, CHIs can amplify the scientific value of their heritage collection and foster cross-border collaboration among researchers. The butterfly story mentioned in part 1 of this series is a clear illustration of the values of open heritage for scientific progress.
From advancing cultural rights and digital equity, to fueling education and scientific research and discovery, open heritage generates ripple effects across society. And as the world faces multiple challenges, open heritage is all the more critical if we want to sustain resilient, free and democratic societies, strengthen fundamental freedoms, and foster the production of new solutions to the world’s biggest problems.
However, as we explored in part 1 of this series, so much of our shared digital heritage remains locked away, despite the fact that heritage in the public domain belongs to the public, and should be free for anyone to access, reuse, and breathe new life into it. Equitable access to heritage is not just a means to enjoy culture as a global public good; it is also a social and economic imperative.
A Global Call for Open Heritage
To support open heritage at scale and protect access to public domain heritage for future generations, we need global alignment. This October, the TAROCH Coalition (Towards a Recommendation on Open Cultural Heritage) will publish the Open Heritage Statement, a collaborative declaration that sets out shared values, challenges, and priorities for closing the global gap in equitable access to heritage. The Statement will enshrine the principles that underpin equitable access and identify concrete actions to lower barriers, enabling open heritage to nurture creativity and shape sustainable futures for all. The Statement is designed to support UNESCO’s ongoing work on cultural rights, digital transformation, and knowledge sharing for sustainable development, reinforcing its founding commitment to the free flow of ideas.
Register today for the launch of the Open Heritage Statement on 14 October, 14:00 UTC to learn more about our global call for equitable access to public domain heritage in the digital environment. Once released, the Statement will be made available for governments, institutions and organizations to sign and promote, laying the groundwork for a future international framework on open heritage.
What is “Openness” in the Context of Heritage?
Openness entered the world of heritage in the early 2000s. Open access in the context of heritage materials means heritage (and associated metadata) is as broadly accessible as possible and it is shared and reused (including commercial use and modification) by anyone for any purpose, at no cost to the user and free from unnecessary copyright restrictions.
Open heritage is achieved by leveraging the vast potential of digital tools and technologies in enhancing access, protecting the public domain from erosion, and encouraging the use of open licenses and tools, such as Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools, to clearly communicate how heritage materials can be accessed and reused. A central tenet is that faithful digital reproductions of public domain materials must stay in the public domain. The Małopolska Virtual Museums in Poland exemplify this principle: “We wish that the Resources which are in the public domain be publicly available to the whole of society, free of charge, in high definition, without watermarks and other technical restrictions (…). Resources that are in the public domain still belong to it after they have been digitized.”
It’s important to note that openness is relative, nuanced and contextual. Open heritage does not aim to force access to heritage that was never meant by its community holders or traditional custodians to be shared, let alone openly shared.
Openness is a means to an end, and not an end in and of itself. It is a means to remove unfair barriers to access and use of heritage, so people can equitably connect and engage with heritage in the digital environment and together build and sustain a thriving commons. It is a pathway to achieve heritage-related goals, such as preservation, safeguarding, transmission, access, representation, and participation.
There are also legal and ethical factors to consider when making heritage open: data protection (protection of personal or confidential information), privacy, and cultural sensitivities around heritage, among others, as well as respect for Indigenous heritage and Traditional Knowledge. In sum, there may be legitimate reasons not to openly share heritage.
This blog post is an adaptation of this pre-print manuscript, where you can discover many more examples of the benefits made possible by open heritage.
We’re kicking off a three-part series leading up to the launch of the Open Heritage Statement in October.
The Statement, developed by the TAROCH Coalition (Towards a Recommendation on Open Cultural Heritage), under the leadership of Creative Commons, is a collaborative, community-fueled initiative calling for equitable access to heritage in the public domain. It represents the shared values, principles, and challenges of more than 60 individual organizations and institutions across 25 countries and 13 global networks that represent multiple organizations, and sets out priorities for advancing openness at a global scale.
Over this series, we’ll explore:
The obstacles that stand in the way of equitable access to heritage in the digital environment;
The meaning of open in the heritage context and the benefits of equitable access, from sparking creativity to advancing human rights, and;
The Open Heritage Statement itself, and how it aims to shape an international framework under UNESCO’s auspices.
Join our global call for equitable access to public domain heritage in the digital environment. Mark your calendars for the Open Heritage Statement Launch on 14 October, 14:00 UTC. Register in advance for this meeting.
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In 2022, the United Kingdom’s Natural History Museum reported that scientists had applied computer vision to over 125,000 of the museum’s collection of digitized images of butterfly specimens dating back hundreds of years and found that insects are changing due to climate change—hotter years produce bigger insects. The Museum explained: “…open access digitized collections … allow scientists from all over the globe to be able to more easily use collections, can accelerate research in a more collaborative way than ever before.”
For anyone promoting open access to heritage collections in the digital environment, the fact that digital images of butterflies made openly accessible thanks to CC0 could help us understand and address climate change—one of the greatest challenges of our times—was incredibly exciting.
This example is representative of the transformative potential of open access to heritage. It shows how making the heritage collections of cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) (such as museums, archives, and libraries) equitably and openly accessible and reusable online, by anyone for any purpose, can bring immense benefits to society. It is telling of how open access epitomizes the dual mission of CHIs of both preserving heritage in the public domain and enabling their users to harness it for the public good.
Unfortunately, not all experiences are as positive as this butterfly story. Douglas McCarthy and Andrea Wallace humorously reported at the Icepops 2022 conference on the £179 fee a museum charged to download a reproduction of a public domain painting by 18th-century artist William Hogarth, turning open heritage into gated access. The same year, German puzzle manufacturer Ravensburger was sued in court by a museum in Italy for the unauthorized use of the images of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (a famous drawing dated c.1490) on a series of puzzles.
As these contrasting examples show, the possibility of accessing and reusing heritage is vital to a creative and innovative society. Open access to heritage enables human progress well beyond the confines of art and culture. Unfortunately, this is all too often compromised by a slew of unnecessary barriers—from incorrect copyright claims over digital reproductions, to technological locks, all the way to prohibitive access fees (and more). As a result, people still face obstacles that prevent them from meaningfully connecting with their heritage. Critical pieces of our shared memory remain out of reach for the communities they represent and for the people eager to build bridges across them.
To help remove these barriers and contribute to equitable sharing of heritage worldwide, a small number of trailblazing institutions, like the UK’s Natural History Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Rijksmuseum, and other pioneering institutions have adopted open access policies, practices, and tools that harness Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools to release digital heritage objects for broad access and fresh reuse, demonstrating the real-world benefits of open sharing.
But despite growing digital capacity, motivation, and best intentions, for the near totality of the world’s CHIs, providing open, equitable access remains a challenge—only about 1% of institutions share heritage as open access. Without an international framework providing clear guidance on how to implement open policies and practices, many institutions are left unsure of what is possible or even where to begin. This is the gap the TAROCH Coalition aims to close by harnessing collective effort for global change.
The Problem: Unnecessary Fences around Public Domain Heritage
Heritage in the public domain should be available for anyone to access and reuse for any purpose, without copyright permission. Yet in reality, the public domain is often fenced off from the public by a swath of barriers preventing both stewards and users from fully and equitably enjoying heritage in the public domain. These barriers are of a legal, technological, financial, and geographical nature, among others. Below we outline some of the most prevalent barriers we see when it comes to CHIs and enabling open access to public domain heritage.
Wrongful Copyright Claims
CHIssometimes restrict access to public domain heritage by erecting legal barriers around it. They do so by claiming an overlay of copyright over faithful digital reproductions of the heritage in their collections. This includes asserting copyright over digitized reproductions and applying (restrictive or open) copyright licenses to limit reuse. For example, as we reported in 2019, the Neues Museum in Berlin released a 3D scan of the 3,000-year-old Nefertiti bust from ancient Egypt under a CC BY-NC-SA license (wrongfully implying an underlying copyright in this digital reproduction).
Pseudo-Copyright Exclusivity
In certain countries, CHIs lean on their country’s cultural heritage laws to prevent copyright-compliant use. This raises another type of legal barrier: by invoking cultural heritage protection laws, institutions may claim a “pseudo-copyright” requiring permission and imposing a fee, thus preventing further use of public domain heritage. By looking at real-world examples, we notice that these laws can achieve the opposite of what they were intended for: to protect and enhance cultural heritage and promote the development of culture. These laws should not restrict prosocial creative reuses.
Contractual Restrictions
Sometimes, CHIs enforce terms and conditions (or terms of use) on their website that restrict reuse of digital heritage. These terms and conditions will often prohibit commercial uses even though this is allowed under copyright law. These terms function as contracts and can mislead users into thinking copyright restrictions apply where they do not. This erodes the integrity of the public domain.
Technical Blocks
Further to the above contractual barriers, some institutions use digital rights management (DRM) and technological protection measures (TPMs) or make available their heritage files with watermarks, as low-resolution files only, or in inaccessible formats. This limits how public domain heritage can be accessed and reused and ends up harming scholarly research and cultural participation. For example, a study in Pakistan “revealed that contents preserved with Sindh Archives & Antiquities on local heritage were shared with Sindh Archives & Antiquities watermarks only. […] From an Open GLAM perspective, the watermarks on digital collections prevent citizens from using and reusing heritage collections and therefore, limit collection outreach.” As Professor Melissa Terras put it back in 2014, “all I want is a clear, 300dpi image. It’s no use saying «this is in the public domain!» if you only provide 72dpi”.
Low Accessibility for People with Disabilities
Unfortunately, public domain heritage is often not available in digital files that allow for the creation of accessible formats for people with disabilities, including print disabilities. This digital exclusion disproportionately affects blind and visually impaired people, as well as those with cognitive and motor impairments. People are thus disempowered from creating versions of heritage materials in accessible formats that meet the needs of everyone.
Economic Barriers
Finally, making heritage in the public domain available to the public requires significant resources, and many CHIs are under pressure to monetize their collections to offset funding shortfalls. Several CHIs charge the equivalent of hundreds of dollars per image for access to digitized public domain works. These fees create barriers for educators, researchers, and smaller cultural creators, particularly outside the Global North. While financial sustainability is important, unreasonable paywalls undermine the public benefit of digital access. As the Creative Commons-funded report “Open Licensing Models in the Cultural Heritage Sector” recommends, institutions should develop economic models for revenue generation that go hand in hand with the open ethos.
The Impact of Barriers on Equitable Access to Heritage
As the above overview of diverse barriers confirms, when CHIs fail to enable equitable access, many important elements of our shared heritage remain locked away, out of reach. And heritage that is inaccessible is at risk of being forgotten, its meaning and context lost, and its transmission to future generations jeopardized. This has repercussions on entire communities of artists and creators, educators, students, scholars, and researchers, as well as members of the public, who lose opportunities to understand, learn, and create with heritage. This also reflects poorly on CHIs: it undermines their public-interest mission of providing universal access to their collections in the digital environment and opens the door to the erosion of cultural diversity, the widening of the digital divide, the weakening of intercultural dialogue, and the loss of shared narratives that connect us to our past and inspire our future.
The barriers that fence off our shared heritage are real, but they are not insurmountable. We believe there is a unique window of opportunity to unlock its full value and place it at the heart of what matters now.
In our next post in this series, we’ll look at these benefits in action, from advancing human rights and education to sparking creativity and scientific discovery, and why they make the case for global alignment even stronger. We will uncover how openness is key to building a future where everyone can connect with, use, and build upon our shared memory.
What’s to Come
Join us. This October, the TAROCH Coalition (Towards a Recommendation on Open Cultural Heritage) will publish the Open Heritage Statement, a collaborative declaration that sets out shared values, challenges, and priorities for closing the global gap in equitable access to heritage. The Statement will enshrine the principles that underpin equitable access and identify concrete actions to lower barriers, enabling open heritage to nurture creativity and shape sustainable futures for all.
The Statement is designed to support UNESCO’s ongoing work on cultural rights, digital transformation, and knowledge sharing for sustainable development, reinforcing its founding commitment to the free flow of ideas.
Once released, the Statement will be open for institutions and organizations to sign and promote, laying the groundwork for a future international framework on open heritage.
The Statement will be launched publicly during a 
Apollo or Venus in your living room? This is the proposition made by Denmark’s Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK) upon openly sharing its vast collection of 