Meet Doug McCarthy, our new Senior Open Content Specialist

We are pleased to announce that Doug McCarthy has joined Open Future as a Senior Open Content Specialist. Doug will lead our work on the CommonsDB project to develop an EU Registry of Public Domain and open-licensed works. CommonsDB is an EU-funded pilot project that represents Open Future’s commitment to supporting the Digital Commons. It is our first initiative to build Public Digital Infrastructure for this purpose.

With over twenty years of international experience in museums, libraries, and archives, Doug brings extensive expertise in cultural heritage collections, open access, and digital strategy. He is passionate about championing free access to and reuse of the Public Domain. His specialties include digital collection management, open access strategies, and copyright and licensing. He has worked with leading organizations, including Creative Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, Flickr Foundation, and the Finnish National Gallery.

At Europeana, the non-profit stewarding Europe’s digital cultural heritage space, Doug spent seven years leading user engagement and driving initiatives for digitized heritage collection reuse. Through engagement with peers and citizens across Europe and beyond, he advocated for open access to public domain collections, interviewing professionals from institutions like the Cleveland Museum of Art, Musée de Bretagne, Agenda Digital de Cultura Mexico, Pinakotheken, and Wellcome Collection. He also launched innovative projects like the annual Digital Storytelling Festival, which bridges art, culture, and history with contemporary life.

With Dr Andrea Wallace, he has led the Open GLAM Survey since 2018, the primary international register of open access policy and practice in cultural heritage. He also co-founded and edits the Medium publication Open GLAM, featuring global perspectives on heritage sector open access.

Doug earned his M.A. Honours in Art History from the University of St Andrews and completed Harvard Law School’s CopyrightX program. He serves as 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.

At Open Future, we are committed to recognizing how Digital Commons serve the public interest. Doug’s Open GLAM expertise, international experience, and dedication to free access and reuse of the Public Domain align perfectly with this vision. We are thrilled to welcome him to our team.