The EU has released the results of its public consultation (May 16, 2008 - September 15, 2008) on the PSI Directive. Excerpt:
...[D]iverging views exist between public sector bodies (the supply side) and reusers (the demand side) on the PSI current reuse environment. While the former group considers it satisfactory and working well, reusers are more critical and consider that the implementation of the Directive has been much too slow....A majority of respondents consider that important barriers remain that would need to be addressed to fully exploit the PSI re-use potential in the EU. The problems that have been frequently signaled are lack of awareness of the potential of PSI reuse and of the Directive amongst public sector bodies, especially at regional and local level, little effort from public bodies for facilitating and promoting reuse, lack of knowledge or mechanisms to identify what information is available for re-use, the non mandatory requirement for PSI re-use, strict licensing conditions imposed by public sector content holders, the limits of the public task when public bodies commercially compete with private firms, unfair competition practices by public sector bodies, very limited transparency on public bodies reuse policies and notably on the way charges are calculated and, the absence of efficient means of redress in most countries.
As regards the impact of the Directive on the charging policies practised by the public sector, the overwhelming majority believes that the implementation has hardly had any impact on the pricing of PSI, although some laudable exceptions have been signalled.
A significant group of stakeholders expressed their support for extending the scope of the Directive to cultural, research and broadcasting institutions, as it conceived that it will have an impact in developing the content market in Europe....
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.
