This is great news - I think all charitable and publicly funded bodies should do this.
Minor quibble - they can't (quite) be both 'out of copyright' and licensed with CC-BY licences. Under UK law what you're licensing isn't the historic image, which is in the public domain regardless of who owns the physical work, but the derivative work created by scanning/photographing the original. Be aware that in a lot of countries, including the US, the act of digitising an image isn't considered to create a derivative work, hence no copyright arises, and the digital file too is in the public domain (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp).
A lot of UK organisations, including plenty who should know better, use this quirk of British law to assert ownership of (and to charge royalties for) public domain works, which strikes me as pretty unethical behaviour. It's made my day to see a high-profile organisation subverting that.
Oli
-----Original Message-----
From: psci-com: on public engagement with science [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Phoebe Harkins
Sent: 20 January 2014 13:48
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [PSCI-COM] Thousands of years of visual culture made free through Wellcome Images
Hi everyone
As you may have seen from our blog and Twitter, we’ve made some changes to the Wellcome Images offer!
All out of copyright historical Wellcome Images are now freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. This means that over 100,000 images can be used and manipulated freely, for commercial or personal purposes, so long as the original source is acknowledged.
High-resolution files from the historical collections can now be downloaded directly from the Wellcome Images website: http://wellcomeimages.org
More details can be found on the Wellcome Library blog: http://wellc.me/1e2uSqf
If you need any further assistance please don’t hesitate to contact [log in to unmask]
All the very best for now,
Phoebe
Phoebe Harkins
Communications Co-ordinator
Wellcome Library
Wellcome Trust
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215 Euston Road
London NW1 2BE, UK
T +44 (0)20 7611 8628
F +44 (0)20 7611 8369
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http://wellcomelibrary.org
From June 2013 – September 2014, the Wellcome Library is undergoing major changes as part of the Wellcome Collection Development Project. We will be open for business, but there will be disruptions to services and some Library areas will be temporarily closed.
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