Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, February 02, 2009

On open data and licensing

Rufus Pollock, Open Data Openness and Licensing, Open Knowledge Foundation Blog, February 2, 2009.

Why bother about openness and licensing for data? ...

It’s crucial because open data is so much easier to break-up and recombine, to use and reuse. We therefore want people to have incentives to make their data open and for open data to be easily usable and reusable — i.e. for open data to form a ‘commons’.

A good definition of openness acts as a standard that ensures different open datasets are ‘interoperable’ and therefore do form a commons. Licensing is important because it reduces uncertainty. ...

See also our recent post on licensing and open science.