AWS Hosted Public Data Sets provide a convenient way to share, access, and use public data within your Amazon EC2 [Elastic Compute Cloud] environment. Select public data sets are hosted on AWS for free as an Amazon EBS [Elastic Block Store] snapshot. Any Amazon EC2 customer can access this data by creating their own personal Amazon EBS volume from a publicly shared Amazon EBS public data set snapshot. They can then access, modify, and perform computation on these data sets directly using an Amazon EC2 instance and just pay for the compute and storage resources that they use. Common use cases for these public data sets would include scientific research, academic studies, and market research. Our goal is to provide easy access to commonly used public data sets like the human genome, astronomy data, and the United States census information.
As ReadWriteWeb points out:
If you have a public data set and hold the rights to the distribution of it, you can submit a request on the AWS Public Hosted Data Sets site to have it included.
See also our past posts on Google's entree into the same business: 1, 2, and 3.
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.
