Curationist Open Access Policy

Our commitment to open access

Curationist exists to increase meaningful public access to cultural heritage online. We aim to make digital cultural heritage materials available for research, inspiration, and enjoyment to the greatest extent possible.

On Curationist, you can freely access, view, and read our collections. When an item is available under an open license or public domain tool, you may generally reuse it under the terms shown on the item record.

What we publish

Curationist publishes two main types of resources:

Digital surrogates
Digital surrogates are digital representations of physical objects—such as a photograph of an artwork or a scan of a document. Where possible, Curationist makes digital surrogates available using machine-readable tools and licenses.

Metadata
Metadata includes information such as creator, date, provenance, descriptive information, and other contextual details. Curationist publishes metadata as openly as possible, and where we control rights in metadata, we publish it using CC0.

How to know what you can reuse

Each item record displays a rights statement or license. That label tells you what you may do with the material and what conditions (if any) apply.

Curationist includes a mix of public domain tools, Creative Commons licenses, and standardized rights statements depending on what is appropriate for each item and what our partners provide.

Curationist’s licensing approach

Curationist’s goal is to support reuse while staying responsible about legal and ethical risk. We currently support these machine-readable statements in our open access program:

These tools are supported where they are applied by source institutions or platforms in accordance with established open standards. We may also display other rights statements from partner institutions where items are not available for open reuse, where rights are unclear, or where additional restrictions apply. These tools are supported where they are applied by source institutions or platforms in accordance with established open standards.

For background definitions (e.g., “digital surrogate,” “public domain,” “CC0,” “rights statements”), see the GLAM-E Glossary.

Scope, platform evolution, and legacy content

Curationist’s Open Access Policy reflects both our foundational commitment to open reuse and the continued evolution of our platform, partnerships, and technical capabilities. Historically, Curationist limited ingestion to works labeled CC0 or CC BY in order to ensure maximum legal clarity for reuse, particularly for commercial and downstream applications. As the platform has matured, and as we collaborate more deeply with global GLAM partners and open cultural infrastructure initiatives, we now support a broader—but still carefully defined—set of public domain tools and open licenses, as described in Section 4.

As a result:

You may encounter works labeled with Public Domain Mark (PDM), CC BY-SA, or No Copyright – United States, alongside CC0 and CC BY.
These labels are applied based on institutional source metadata, established open standards, and documented risk assessments.
The presence of a broader license set does not signal a relaxation of Curationist’s commitment to clarity, reuse, or responsibility. Rather, it reflects a deliberate effort to align with widely used international open access practices while maintaining strong ethical review processes.

Curationist may also display records sourced from partner institutions where:

reuse is limited or unclear,
media is intentionally restricted while metadata remains visible, or
ethical considerations warrant additional context or caution

In all cases, the rights statement displayed on the individual item record governs reuse, and users are encouraged to review that information carefully, particularly for high-stakes or jurisdiction-specific uses.

This policy applies to all content published on Curationist unless otherwise noted and may be updated periodically to reflect evolving standards, partnerships, and community expectations.

Attribution: how to credit works you reuse

Even when attribution is not legally required (for example, with public domain materials), it is a strong community norm and helps others find the source.

Whenever possible, please include:

Creator (if known)
Title (if known)
Date (if known)
Holding institution / source (as shown on the record)
A link back to the item record
The license / rights statement

Suggested format:
“Title, Creator, Date — via Curationist (source institution: Institution Name), Link, License/Rights Statement.”

Use of partner APIs and open technical access

Curationist relies on APIs and other structured data access mechanisms provided by partner institutions and open cultural platforms to ingest and transform public domain and openly licensed cultural heritage data.Each item record displays a rights statement or license. That label tells you what you may do with the material and what conditions (if any) apply.

As a general principle, Curationist prioritizes the use of open, publicly accessible APIs for accessing cultural data that is already designated for public reuse. For public domain materials and openly licensed works, gated access mechanisms such as mandatory API keys—when used solely for analytics or perceived security—are often unnecessary and may introduce avoidable friction for interoperability and reuse.

Curationist’s use of partner APIs is limited to:

data and media already designated by source institutions for public access, and
materials accompanied by clear rights statements or licenses, as described in this policy.

Curationist does not seek access to private, user-generated, or non-public data, and does not require elevated permissions beyond what is needed to retrieve and transform publicly available cultural information.

This approach supports transparency, reduces technical barriers to collaboration, and aligns with widely adopted open cultural infrastructure practices.

Ethical stewardship and culturally sensitive materials

Open access decisions are not only legal decisions.

Even when materials are labeled for open reuse, some items may raise ethical concerns—such as images involving Indigenous communities, other vulnerable or marginalized people, human remains, or culturally sensitive contexts.

Curationist may:

add contextual notes where appropriate,
honor well-founded requests to restrict display or reuse guidance, and/or
remove or replace media while retaining non-sensitive descriptive metadata when that supports accountability and discovery.

Share your use with us

We love learning how materials are reused for education, research, creative work, community storytelling, and more.

If you reuse something you found on Curationist, please consider telling us: https://www.curationist.org/contact

Requests, questions, and higher-resolution images

For questions about reuse, permissions, or requests (including higher-resolution media), contact:

Email: contact@curationist.org

Notice, takedown, and ethical review process

Curationist works in good faith to publish materials responsibly, but we cannot eliminate all risk.

If you believe content on Curationist:

infringes copyright or related rights,
violates privacy or publicity rights,
contains sensitive cultural content that should not be displayed or redistributed, or
otherwise should be reviewed,

please contact contact@curationist.org and include:

the link(s) to the relevant item(s),
a short explanation of the concern,
and (if applicable) information supporting your request (e.g., rightsholder relationship, community authority, or other basis).

We may temporarily restrict access while we review. We aim to respond within 15 working days

Reference model: This policy is adapted from the GLAM-E Lab’s External Open Access Policies model.