The National Archives is a government department and Crown body, and our employees are civil servants.
All the work created by UK civil servants in the course of their official duties is subject to Crown copyright. This includes research outputs, for instance articles in academic journals and cataloguing.
At The National Archives we make our information available for use and re-use under the terms of the Open Government Licence.
The Open Government Licence is an open, non-transactional licence for public sector information, and is the default licence for Crown bodies. It is compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 and the Open Data Commons Attribution License.
When we do research in collaboration with partners, for instance universities, any outputs created by our employees in the course of that research will be subject to Crown copyright. The copyright in any research outputs that are jointly created by us and our partners will be jointly owned by the partner and the Crown.
In addition, we seek agreement from our partners that collaborative research outputs can be made available under the terms of the Open Government Licence.
If you are interested in working with us on a collaborative research project, please talk to us about copyright at an early stage.