...The Statistics and Registration Service Bill, now before Parliament, aims to create a new body to produce and scrutinise official statistics, free from political spin. However, critics say the proposals do not go far enough.
Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign is interested in the bill for two reasons. First, national statistics are an important example of public sector information being posted free on the web. We would like to see all impersonal data collected by government to be made available this way, for the benefit both of democracy and the knowledge economy. Second, the governance regime now before Parliament could be applied to other types of data, from maps to weather forecasts....
"We welcome the general idea, but it doesn't go far enough," said Keith Dugmore of the Statistics Users' Forum. He warned that, as currently drafted, the bill would only guarantee the independence of statistics produced by the present Office for National Statistics - but not by other bodies which generate the headline-grabbing figures on education, health and crime....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/18/2007 11:14:00 PM.
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.
