Intellectual Property Rights in Environmental and Natural History Collections: A Preliminary Discussion

In an era where digitization and networking technologies offer a new way for environmental and natural history institutions, like natural history museums and science centers, to promote their services to the general public, new challenges rise on the field on intellectual property rights. Natural Europe project aim is to make natural history knowledge accessible on an open access basis to a wide spectrum of end-users, through Europeana portal. The value the project delivers is not merely in making works available online, but in the open access terms under which the works are available. Therefore understanding Intellectual Property considerations is fundamental in achieving this goal. The aim of this paper is to enable a further discussion on issues concerning the intellectual property rights for environmental and natural history collections.