...Cabinet Office minister, Tom Watson...was introducing a progress report on the Power of Information review, which last June urged the government to make better use of social media and to make its data available for reuse. The interim report contains 15 sets of promises for making official information more easily available for reuse. However, it's noncommittal on the original review's call for government trading funds to make their core data available for free unless there is good evidence to levy charges.
In his speech, Watson reaffirmed his support for Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign, suggesting that the government trading fund system had outlived its usefulness....He referred to a "lively debate" about whether the economy and society would be better served by giving the data away. That debate, of course, has been given renewed vigour by the publication alongside the Budget of the Cambridge economic study into the costs and benefits of making various trading funds' "public task" data free. That suggested the wider economy would see a net gain of £164m from making raw data from the six biggest trading funds - Land Registry, Companies House, Ordnance Survey, the Met Office and the UK Hydrographic Office - available for free reuse....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/04/2008 11:38:00 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.
