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Monday, June 23, 2008

Freeing up PSI in the UK

Michael Cross, Austrian mountains: now 93% cheaper, The Guardian, June 19, 2008.  Excerpt:

In a remarkable turnabout in public policy, Britain is emerging as the champion of moves to require European governments to make data gathered and held by public bodies freely available to the knowledge economy....

Carol Tullo, head of the Office of Public Sector Information, last week backed proposals for reforms to give more teeth to a European directive governing the re-use of information collected by public bodies....

Tullo...was addressing an EU-funded network, ePSIplus, set up to examine the 2003 European directive on public sector information (PSI) and recommend new provisions. If adopted, the recommendations would encourage governments to make data available unless there was demonstrable reason not to, and to charge no more than the marginal cost of disseminating data - in effect, zero for digital information....