I have been an open research advocate for many years, but have not yet written much about open culture. In fact, I hadn’t thought much about the term before I came across a Creative Commons blog post.

Open Culture

As it turns out, “open culture” seems to be a relatively new term, also to them. The CC team shares three reasons for using the term:

  1. Open culture is readily understandable and does not include an unfamiliar acronym
  2. Open culture is broad in scope envisioning open sharing of cultural heritage as a participatory experience
  3. Open culture encapsulates the synergies between culture as heritage and as contemporary creativity

Their approach appears to be mostly centered on the needs of “GLAMs”: galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. However, it is an interesting move, and it could help spread the word about the need to enhance openness.

Open Research vs Open Culture

A relevant question arises for those of us working in institutions that attempt to combine research and the arts. On one side, we have the requirements for Open Research from funders and institutions. On the other hand, there is the new concept of Open Culture. Are they compatible? I don’t have an answer just yet; this is something I (and others) will need to ponder in the time ahead. An immediate thought is that they overlap to some extent but are also different.

As we have seen over the last few years, one of the challenges with making music research open is that it often involves numerous copyright issues. We cannot simply place a CC license on our data and claim that everything is open. Exploring openness within music research is a core activity with our ongoing Musiclab innovation project. There, we have uncovered more problems than we have solved, but, hey, that is also a way of moving forward.

Further Reading

Some pointers to relevant resources: