The information policy community lost an international force and a guardian of open access last week when Peter Weiss passed away unexpectedly. He was 54. [Photo.] Weiss was the principal author of Office of Management and Budget [OMB] Circular A-130, the protocol that governs how federal agencies use information. Weiss' most recent career accomplishment came to fruition last winter. As a policy analyst at the National Weather Service (NWS), he outlined the scope of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's policy on providing unrestricted, open-format weather data to the public. The policy, adopted in December 2004, reversed the long-standing practice of offering weather information in proprietary formats to a limited number of companies for resale....Bruce McConnell, former chief of information policy and technology at OMB, had been a friend since Weiss joined OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in 1991. "His area of specialty was disseminating government information at [the lowest] cost ... not trying to turn it into a fundraising effort," McConnell said. "He controlled the typewriter" on A-130, McConnell said, adding that the move to NWS in 2000 allowed Weiss to champion information access globally. His devotion to freely available weather information saved lives, McConnell said. As an expert in information policy and law, Weiss advised governments worldwide on the economics of government information policy. For example, he flew to Russia and China to discuss open access with officials in those countries. At OMB, Weiss had an assertiveness rarely seen in the reserved agency, his former supervisor recalls. Rob Veeder, since retired, hired Weiss to work in OIRA's information technology branch. "At the time, we were encouraging agencies to provide information to the public, outside the context of the Freedom of Information Act," he said. "Peter was a pusher." Weiss' most recent boss said Weiss had not lost any of that initial energy. "He was an enthusiastic and effective advocate for open and unrestricted access to government information — not just for NOAA, but for the world," said Edward Johnson, director of strategic planning and policy at NWS.
(PS: Peter Weiss' most recent work on open access seems to be this: Yvette Pluijmers and Peter Weiss, Borders in Cyberspace: Conflicting Government Information Policies and their Economic Impacts, a preprint or discussion draft, April 28, 2005. Here's the description from my blog posting in April: 'A detailed (81 pp.) analysis of OA to public-sector information, including publicly-funded scientific data, covering the benefits of OA, the arguments for cost-recovery, the (now hot) issue of government competition with the private sector, and case studies from the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, and Finland.')
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/01/2005 08:06:00 AM.
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.
