Hooray for the V & A!

The Victoria and Albert Museum has announced that it will no longer charge academics and scholars for using its digital images – a move that could have major implications for art publishing.

The new policy comes into place in order to bolster the museum’s commitment to providing access to its collections, but it will mean that some revenue is lost (possibly over £100,000 a year). It may also put pressure on other major institutions to end charging for image downloads, a practice up to now jealously guarded by many of the big UK galleries.

From early 2007, visitors to the Collections Online database at www.vam.ac.uk will be able to easily download hi-resolution images free of charge, providing they are for academic use. The definition of this will be quite broad, but the finer aspects of the policy’s implementation have yet to be set in stone.

From the 24 Hour Museum. We have commented before on the chilling effect of ever-increasing reproduction fees on academic publications of very limited circulation and laughably small budgets. It's bad enough when a young scholar has to beg for grants to pay for the illustrations accompanying an article, but there are some older books of the highest importance that literally could not have been published if image reproduction fees had been what they are today. It is to be hoped that the V & A's example will start a trend -- and one can be sure that the amount of income forgone will be minimal.

Note, however, that while the precedent is excellent, the new policy covers digitized images only.

Posted by David on December 3, 2006 8:24 PM