A project to put historical election data online has run into a problem familiar to supporters of Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign: Ordnance Survey's copyright....
Such data is collected by the boundary commission, a taxpayer-funded government department, and then turned over to and made available by Ordnance Survey: ...OS makes all electoral boundaries available through the Election Maps website, where they can be viewed at high resolution street-map scales.
Use of the site is limited to political activity such as campaigning and canvassing, full-time educational, and personal use. The data cannot be extracted - a restriction that has puzzled some electoral parties which have contacted the Free Our Data campaign over the past year, including the Scottish Green Party, which wanted to put boundaries of forthcoming council elections on a website. It was turned down on the grounds that the maps are Crown copyright....
Dr Humphrey Southall, the director of the University of Portsmouth's project [to put some 19th century election data online], points out a further irony: if the project's website, which is funded by the universities' Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), were visible only within further and higher education institutions, it would be covered by EDINA, a wide-ranging access agreement between data suppliers including OS and JISC. "It only arises because it's open access," says Southall. "Taxpayers would be amazed what is available within higher education, which is paid for by the general public but isn't available to the general public." ...
Southall says the ideal would be for OS's data to be in the public domain, as in the United States, and as Guardian Technology's Free Our Data campaign argues....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/22/2007 04:57:00 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.
