Handling the open culture dilemma in museum management: an exploratory interdisciplinary study

As part of their evolving social and digital mission tasked with fostering sustainability and inclusion throughout the physical-digital continuum, museums increasingly focus on open – accessible, participatory and representative – culture. While openness is key in the service of society, museums face an open culture dilemma as copyright complicates their decision-making. Despite its relevance, research on this topic is limited: little has been done to integrate the management and copyright domains, and the legal perspective predominates. This theoretical study adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to shed light on the open culture dilemma affecting museum strategies and practices. These aspects strongly intertwine with ethical issues and reveal contrasting perspectives in managerial and copyright frameworks. Building on convergence-divergence discourses on openness/closure of culture in these disciplines, the authors designed an exploratory matrix of approaches to open culture management in relation to copyright in museums to be operationalised and tested through empirical analysis.