One accusation we face at Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign is that public sector information is a minority interest. Why should any normal person, let alone a busy government minister, be interested in subjects like free access to geospatial information?
A simmering political row over a fiasco that cost English farmers £20m and a senior civil servant his job may move the issue up the agenda. The National Farmers' Union said this week that geographical information was a key factor in the latest fiasco involving government IT....
Maps printed from the Land Register were sent to every farmer claiming subsidy to check. According to Julie Robinson, a lawyer with the National Farmers' Union, this is where the system went wrong. "Many of the maps sent back to farmers to check turned out to be seriously inaccurate." ...
Freely available mapping data might not have prevented the rural payments fiasco - but it would have given all parties more warning that it was coming....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/20/2007 04:01:00 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.
