Doug McCarthy

About Doug

Doug is Senior Open Content Specialist at Open Future. He has extensive expertise in cultural heritage collections, open access, and digital strategy. Doug is passionate about the vital role of free access to and reuse of the Public Domain.

An art historian by academic training, Doug has more than twenty years of experience working internationally in museums, libraries and archives. His areas of expertise include managing digital collections, open access strategies, copyright and licensing. Doug has collaborated with many international organizations, including Creative Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, Flickr Foundation, and the Finnish National Gallery.

Doug spent more than seven years with Europeana, the non-profit organization that stewards the common European data space for cultural heritage, where he led user engagement activities and contributed to many initiatives driving the reuse of digitized heritage collections. Doug played a leading role in promoting open access to public domain collections by engaging with peers and citizens across Europe and beyond. Highlights included interviews with professionals at Cleveland Museum of Art, Musée de Bretagne, Agenda Digital de Cultura Mexico, Pinakotheken, and Wellcome Collection. Doug also fostered new initiatives such as the annual Digital Storytelling Festival, which inspires participants to create connections between art, culture and history, and the contemporary world.

Doug is a respected researcher and author in the field of Open GLAM, the global network developing policies and practices on ethical open access to cultural heritage. He writes regularly about copyright, licensing and online public domain heritage. Since 2018, Doug has led the Open GLAM Survey, the leading international register of open access policy and practice in the cultural heritage sector, with Dr Andrea Wallace. He is also the co-founder and editor of the Medium publication Open GLAM, which shares diverse global perspectives on open access in the heritage sector.

Doug holds an M.A. Honours in Art History from the University of St Andrews, and he is an alumnus of Harvard Law School’s CopyrightX programme. Doug is a Research Fellow at the GLAM-E Lab, an Advisory Board Member at Free Knowledge Africa, an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Digital Media Management. Doug lives in Delft with his wife and three cats. In his free time, he enjoys music and cooking.