Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, November 20, 2008

Tracking and advocating OA for Australian PSI

Kylie Pappalardo, New: literature review and website on access to public sector information, OctaviaNet, November 21, 2008.  (Thanks to Brianna Laugher.)  Excerpt:

Professor Anne Fitzgerald of the QUT Law Faculty is currently undertaking the massive task of reviewing the literature around policies and principles on access to and reuse of public sector information in Australia and worldwide....[She] will be releasing the literature review in installments as each chapter is completed.

She has just released Chapter 1: Australia and Chapter 2: New Zealand....The literature review so far is extremely comprehensive – chapters 1 and 2 alone comprise 268 pages! ...

Currently, the literature review is available in the QUT ePrints Repository (here), but it will soon appear on the new website...of a new research group with which I am involved – Access to and Use of Public Sector Information (auPSI). auPSI’s mission is to provide a comprehensive web portal that:

  • promotes debate and discussion about the re-use of PSI in Australia and more broadly throughout the world;
  • focuses on developing and implementing an open content licensing model to promote access to and re-use of government information;
  • develops information policy products about delivering access to and encouraging the re-use of PSI;
  • keeps users informed about international developments in this area; and
  • assists governments and policy makers on the development of appropriate policy about the creation, collection, development and dissemination of public sector information....
The literature review will be released in full on this website, as will a forthcoming article by Neale Hooper, Timothy Beale, Professor Anne Fitzgerald and Professor Brian Fitzgerald entitled, “The use of Creative Commons licensing to enable open access to public sector information and publicly funded research results – an overview of recent Australian developments”....