We believe that state-collected geodata should be openly available to citizens....Geodata is a public good. Open access to it, under a 'Commons' (ShareAlike) license, is the best way to see its full benefits realized by industry and citizens. At the same time such an arrangement, by requiring users to redistribute updates and improvements to the data, promises to deliver more and better data for less....Online mapping projects creating freely reusable geodata should offer a compatible open license....Common, standard formats for describing and exchanging geodata should be adopted....When more information producers have the opportunity to contribute timely and accurate geodata, quality improves. When more organisations have the chance to offer spatial information services competitively, prices lower. Over 50% of UK national mapping data sales are to government or government-funded organisations; a false economy sending 60M of tax-based revenue back to a government-owned semi-private company. Ordinary citizens and not-for-profit organisations can't afford the current monopoly-priced data licenses, and are reduced to supplication. Open geodata would be good for the economy. In the United States, national policy places all government-collected geospatial information into the public domain, free of cost and free of restrictions on re-use. This lowers the cost of research and development, and innovation by industry and by individuals creates economic activity. Open access to geodata would be good for democracy and citizen engagement 75-80% of the information generated by government has a spatial component. For public sector information to be effectively exploited, it needs to be as widely available as possible. EU Freedom Of Information laws heavily emphasise availability of geographic data.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
