Open access means a museum publishes images of artworks it considers public domain — with no copyright claim, no permission request, no fee. The Metropolitan Museum of Art made roughly 375,000 images available under CC0 in February 2017; the Rijksmuseum had already gone further with Rijksstudio, letting users download, crop and remix masterpieces at high resolution; and in February 2020 the Smithsonian released images of millions of collection objects across its museums and archives into the public domain. Together they turned a long-running legal argument — can a museum own the image of a painting it doesn’t own the copyright to? — into settled practice for much of the field.
What Does Open Access Actually Mean?
The key term is CC0 (Creative Commons Zero), a legal instrument by which an institution waives, to the extent it can, all rights it might assert in an image. That means anyone — commercial or not, with or without credit — can download, print, alter, sell and republish. It is distinct from “openly viewable”: museums have let people look at collections online for decades, but looking is not licensing. Open access is the difference between a shop window and a warehouse door.
Museums apply it only to works they judge out of copyright (author life plus 70 years in most jurisdictions) and to photographs that fail the creativity threshold for their own copyright — a faithful reproduction of a two-dimensional public-domain painting is not an original work in most analyses, a principle US case law supports. Living artists, still-in-copyright estates and some national rules keep big chunks of any collection behind the permission wall. That is why open access is a large minority of most collections, not the whole thing.
Why Did the Met Do It in 2017?
Because the alternative was losing. The Met was spending real money and goodwill policing image requests while Wikipedia, Pinterest and a thousand shops reproduced its public-domain images anyway. Under then-leadership including chief digital officer Loic Tallon’s Open Access program, the museum flipped the logic: give the images away under CC0 through a public API, and capture the value in reach, scholarship, brand and data instead of license fees. The Met paired the release with Met Open Access Art Dashboards and creative-coding collaborations — an innovation posture that fitted its 2016–17 strategic pivot toward digital audiences.
The Rijksmuseum had made the intellectual case earlier and more radically. Its Rijksstudio platform, launched in 2012 after a deliberately provocative internal debate, offers ultra-high-resolution downloads and even supports printing remixed masterworks on phone cases and shower curtains. The Dutch position: the objects belong to everyone; restricting their images is a tax on culture the museum has no right to levy.
What Did the Smithsonian Release in 2020?
In February 2020 the Smithsonian launched Smithsonian Open Access with nearly 3 million items from its museums, research centers, libraries and archives — images and 3D models under CC0 — and the number has grown steadily since. The scale matters: this is not just art but specimens, documents and data, released with metadata that makes computational research possible. For scholars working on anything from material culture to biodiversity, it converted a permissions economy into a download economy overnight.
Who Uses Open Access Images?
Everyone, and mostly not the way museums predicted.
- Scholars and teachers — lectures, publications and datasets without clearance delays.
- Wikipedia and Wikimedia — open access instantly became the illustration supply chain for the world’s encyclopedia.
- Designers and brands — textiles, packaging, editorial art built from public-domain collections; commercially legal, occasionally aesthetically dubious.
- AI developers — open-access corpora became training data by default, a use nobody negotiated in 2017 and everyone has opinions about now.
- The museums themselves — APIs power in-gallery apps, collection sites and cross-institution projects.
What Are Museums Afraid Of?
Three things. Revenue: image licensing was a real (if small) income line, and rights-and-reproductions departments had to be re-missioned rather than quietly shrunk. Control: a CC0 Vermeer can appear on a political flyer or a vape brand, and the museum has no veto. Erosion of distinctiveness: if every museum gives away its images, the images become commodities and the competitive value migrates to buildings, exhibitions and originals — which, defenders answer, is exactly where it belongs.
The counterargument is empirical. Post-2017, museums that went open reported higher traffic, richer scholarly use and no collapse of licensing income that mattered. The image economy was already free; formalizing it just moved the credit.
Who Hasn’t Gone Open — and Why?
A meaningful holdout cohort remains, especially in continental Europe where museums assert copyright in their photographs of two-dimensional works (a claim US practice largely rejects) — some national institutions charge aggressively for image licenses and treat open access as revenue vandalism. Artist-estate negotiations keep modern and contemporary collections largely out of scope everywhere. And institutions whose collections are heavily encumbered by donor or third-party rights find the clearance labor, not the philosophy, is the barrier.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sell products made from open access images?
Yes — CC0 means no permission and no royalties, for commercial use included. The caveats are practical: the underlying artwork must be public domain (the museum’s open-access mark is your signal), trademark law still protects the museum’s logo if you splash it on merchandise, and good taste remains optional but advisable.
Does open access include every artwork in a museum?
No. It covers works the museum judges out of copyright, with images it releases under CC0 — typically a large minority of holdings. In-copyright works, donor restrictions and unresolved rights keep the rest behind request-based licensing.
Why did museums charge for images of old paintings at all?
They claimed copyright in the photograph even where the painting was public domain — a position US courts have largely rejected for faithful reproductions of two-dimensional works. Charging persisted on inertia and on European copyright traditions that do protect such photos.
Are open access images used to train AI models?
They are — CC0 imposes no use restrictions, and open-access corpora are convenient training data. Museums are still working through what reciprocity, credit or compensation should look like for that particular downstream use.
What was the first major museum to go open access?
The Rijksmuseum made the boldest early move with Rijksstudio in 2012, but the Met’s 2017 CC0 release at hundreds of thousands of images set the template for the American field, and the Smithsonian’s 2020 launch scaled it to millions of objects across disciplines.
