Tell us all about the Paris Musées open access announcement.

From January 2020, Paris Musées will begin releasing digital images of its out-of-copyright works into the public domain under the Creative Commons CC0 waiver. Our first release numbers more than 150,000 images and other sets will follow. We are publishing the material set by set so that the copyright status of the artworks and photographs can be carefully evaluated.

Which collections and what type of images are being openly released?

Paris Musées manages the fourteen museums of the City of Paris and altogether the collection numbers over a million artworks. From archaeology to fashion and contemporary art, the collections are remarkably diverse and they are still being digitised. Since May 2016 our collections have been accessible online at http://parismuseescollections.paris.fr/en.

What motivated Paris Musées to adopt open access now?

Paris Musées has been working on its open access strategy for some time and discussions intensified during the development of our collections website. Our project team was aware of the international Open GLAM movement and we wanted to make our own contribution to it.

Paris Musées’s contract with our photo agency ends on 31 December 2019 so we needed to start thinking about the future. We saw this moment as an opportunity to regain control of how we manage our digital images – a new beginning for our image publishing strategy began!