Ten weeks after Guardian Technology launched the "Free Our Data" campaign on March 9, government advisers are starting to consider its message. Last Friday, the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information - set up in 2003 to advise the government on how to exploit its digital crown jewels - published the minutes of its annual seminar. They reveal that "the 'Free Our Data' campaign organised by The Guardian was raised". The chair of the advisory panel, Professor Richard Susskind, told us this week: "We welcome the thrust of your campaign because you recognise the value of public-sector information, and are doing a fine job of raising awareness."...
But first, to recap. The campaign's argument - made in "Give Us Back Our Crown Jewels" (March 9) is that the British government owns one of the world's most valuable collections of intellectual property. Government policy on what it should do with this information is muddled. On one hand, it encourages free access, for example to historic census returns. On the other hand, agencies holding some of the most valuable information are required to operate on a quasi-commercial basis, charging for access to their data. The most efficient and astute of these so-called trading funds, such as Ordnance Survey, operate at no direct cost to the taxpayer and even make a profit for the Treasury. However, we contend that this policy has a wider cost. At best, it generates an absurd bureaucracy in which one government agency has to negotiate contracts with another government agency for permission to use information which the government already owns. At worst, it stifles the knowledge economy because any start-up business based on government data is liable to find itself in direct commercial competition with the very body which produces that data. Tales of unfair practices abound.
Our proposal is that the government gets out of the market and leaves data pricing to the market. Data collected by the public sector (apart from necessary exceptions to protect privacy and national security) should be available to all for free, to exploit as they wish. This would require higher taxes to fund the national collection of, for example, meteorological data. But this cost would be outweighed by the economic benefits of creating taxpaying companies and jobs....[W]e stand by the arguments at the centre of our campaign:
The public sector is best positioned to collect data, and the private sector best placed for commercial exploitation
Taxpayers should not have to pay twice, or three times, for data they already own
At the very least, the government needs to produce better evidence to justify the overall cost of the status quo.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/25/2006 10:22:00 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.
