The Rijksmuseum Open Data Policy

The Rijksmuseum operates an Open Data Policy to connect the treasures in its collection – as well as its knowledge about them – with as large and diverse an audience as possible. We provide digital images of objects from the collection, descriptive object information (metadata) and bibliographic data via our data services without restrictions on reuse.

Public domain

Many of the objects in the Rijksmuseum are in the public domain. This means that copyright is no longer applicable and that the objects are public property. The public must be able to reap the benefits of that. You can therefore use digital reproductions of public domain objects made available by the Rijksmuseum without permission being required. For commercial purposes too.

All the digital reproductions and data that we currently publish via our data services are made by the Rijksmuseum. To the extent that copyright and database rights apply to these digital sources, the Rijksmuseum waives these rights by using the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) Public Domain Statement.

When collections objects are free of copyright, this is explicitly stated in the corresponding descriptive metadata. In these cases, the copyright notice states “Public domain”, with a reference to the CC0 Public Domain Statement.

If a copyrighted person or organisation is listed with the copyright notice, copyright does still apply.

Acknowledging sources

The Rijksmuseum considers it good practice to state the name of the creator of the original object when reusing our digitised objects. We also appreciate it when the Rijksmuseum is cited as the source when objects and data are reused. This recognises both the creator’s effort and the hard work that our employees put in every day to build, maintain and make available the museum’s collection and knowledge. These recommendations are in accordance with the Europeana Public Domain Usage Guidelines.

New data sources

The Rijksmuseum is constantly generating new data. Ongoing research into the collection and continuing digitisation always yield new knowledge and insights, which we want to share with the public as widely and as openly as possible. It is possible that the Rijksmuseum's Open Data Policy will be developed in the future to facilitate the reuse of newly available datasets. So keep an eye on this page.

Further information

The Rijksmuseum's Open Data Policy is developed and implemented by the Research Services department. For any questions, contact us via the contact form.