... [The Council] recommends that, in establishing or reviewing their policies regarding access and use of public sector information, Member countries take due account of and implement the following principles ...
Openness. Maximising the availability of public sector information for use and re-use based upon presumption of openness as the default rule to facilitate access and re-use. ...
Access and transparent conditions for re-use. Encouraging broad non-discriminatory competitive access and conditions for re-use of public sector information, eliminating exclusive arrangements, and removing unnecessary restrictions on the ways in which it can be accessed, used, re-used, combined or shared, so that in principle all accessible information would be open to re-use by all. Improving access to information over the Internet and in electronic form. ...
Asset lists. Strengthening awareness of what public sector information is available for access and re-use. ...
Quality. Ensuring methodical data collection and curation practices to enhance quality and reliability ...
Integrity. ... Developing and implementing appropriate safeguards to protect information from unauthorised modification ...
New technologies and long-term preservation. Improving interoperable archiving, search and retrieval technologies ...
Copyright. Intellectual property rights should be respected. There is a wide range of ways to deal with copyrights on public sector information, ranging from governments or private entities holding copyrights, to public sector information being copyright-free. Exercising copyright in ways that facilitate re-use ... and encouraging institutions and government agencies that fund works from outside sources to find ways to make these works widely accessible to the public.
Pricing. When public sector information is not provided free of charge, pricing public sector information transparently and consistently ... Where possible, costs charged to any user should not exceed marginal costs of maintenance and distribution ...
Competition. ... Requiring public bodies to treat their own downstream/value-added activities on the same basis as their competitors for comparable purposes ... Promoting non-exclusive arrangements for disseminating information so that public sector information is open to all possible users and re-users on non-exclusive terms.
Public private partnerships. Facilitating public-private partnerships where appropriate and feasible in making public sector information available ...
International access and use. ... [P]romote greater interoperability and facilitate sharing and comparisons of national and international datasets. Striving for interoperability and compatible and widely used common formats.
Best practices. Encouraging the wide sharing of best practices and exchange of information on enhanced implementation ...
Comment. This statement piles on previous recommendations by the OECD (e.g. as described here). See also the earlier report from the working group that prepared these recommendations.
It's noteworthy that the recommendations call for greater online access, and that they suggest applying them to work funded by government agencies, not just that created by government employees. But the recommendations are for data, not scientific publications. Nevertheless, the principle should be somewhat transferable.
Managing copyright to facilitate re-use is a good recommendation; so is limiting user fees to those necessary to recoup the marginal costs of providing access. But the recommendations could have gone farther and called for government works to be in the public domain. They also stopped short of calling for greater clarity on the copyright status of data, and for the lifting of legal rights on data where they exist.
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 6/28/2008 06:20:00 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.
