Getting information out of government is a bit like getting blood from a stone. For more than two years, the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) project has struggled to ensure that departments open their trove of information maps and data on forests, minerals, town planning, rainfall, archaeology for being placed on a proposed Geospatial Information System (GIS) backbone.
Slowly, official curmudgeonness gave way to curiosity and then an awareness of the power of GIS. As turf-zealous babus began to understand that GIS has immense benefits for every department which will be part of NSDI, and that they would be at the frontiers of science and technology, that data began to be shared....
The NSDI web-user interface will provide open access of the information processed by the project....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/19/2007 09:35:00 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.
