Next week the city of Vancouver will take up a motion to support open data, open standards, and open source. (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) Excerpt:
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT the City of Vancouver endorses the principles of:
Open and Accessible Data - the City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns; ...
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT in pursuit of open data the City of Vancouver will:
Identify immediate opportunities to distribute more of its data;
Index, publish and syndicate its data to the internet using prevailing open standards, interfaces and formats;
Develop appropriate agreements to share its data with the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) and encourage the ICIS to in turn share its data with the public at large
Develop a plan to digitize and freely distribute suitable archival data to the public;
Ensure that data supplied to the City by third parties (developers, contractors, consultants) are unlicensed, in a prevailing open standard format, and not copyrighted except if otherwise prevented by legal considerations;
License any software applications developed by the City of Vancouver such that they may be used by other municipalities, businesses, and the public without restriction....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/15/2009 12:31:00 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.
