The Scandinavian state requires public bodies responsible for geodata to share it freely....
Norway...has swept away commercial barriers to exchanging information between public bodies in a way that Britain could usefully emulate.
The Digital Norway plan requires all public bodies responsible for geodata to "collaborate in the establishment, operation and maintenance of a common national infrastructure". Data "must be clearly and easily available", the plan says.
Instead of negotiating licences with each other, custodians of official data about Norway's environment, land and marine topographies make their data available to all their official colleagues through a national portal, geoNorge....
Norway's national mapping agency Statkart, last week demonstrated some of the mashup possibilities that arise....
Olaf Ostensen, the head of Statkart, says such ideas have become much easier to realise since a government decision four years ago that data should be shared between public bodies. He explains: "Instead of buying information from each other, we all put money in to a joint fund to finance an information infrastructure we can have for free." ...
Norway is no nirvana of free data, however. Although the public has access to data on the geoNorge portal, anyone wishing to re-use data in a commercial product must negotiate a licence with the government information agency Norsk Eiendomsinformasjon, or NE, a limited company owned by the Ministry of Justice. Our [Free Our Data] campaign argues that it would be better to make such data freely available to all comers, in the interests both of democracy and nurturing the knowledge economy....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/27/2007 09:37:00 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.
