When Meteo Consult, Europe's largest private weather information company, asked the Polish national meteorological office if it could use its forecasting data, it was told there was no licensing procedure. The information was not available to commercial users.
This represents an extreme example of the variation between different governments' attitude to public-sector information: some European countries, such as Britain and Norway, make equivalent data available for free; another charges a licensing fee of €186,000 ($127,000) a year. The differing access and pricing regimes are a nightmare for firms such as Meteo Consult, trying to compete in the global market. Such restrictive practices and prohibitive pricing mean that the European market in weather information is one tenth the size of that in the US, says Jennifer Campbell, Meteo Consult's managing director. "We need a single market for weather data in Europe," she says.
Guardian Technology's Free Our Data campaign has a simple answer to the problem: public bodies should make available freely for re-use all data they collect at taxpayers' expense. They should leave the business of selling value-added products based on the data to the private sector....
The main free dissemination example is the US. Its policy of free access is summed up by a 1996 circular by the federal Office of Management and Budget, which states: "The economic benefits to society are maximised when government information is available in a timely and equitable manner to all." This economic policy is rooted in three sets of principles of US government. These are:
Legal. Specific laws govern public rights to access to government information and bar public agencies from making exclusive contracts with private firms to exploit public data. The US's Copyright Act forbids the federal government from claiming copyright (though individual states can, and use this to enforce charges).
Ethical. This principle holds that the public owns the data, having paid for its collection and storage through taxes. Charging again would be wrong in principle.
Political, as set out in the US constitution's right to free expression. "Closed information policies are a tool of repression and lead to corruption," says Paul Uhlir, director of international science and technology information at the US National Academies....
Comment. Cross is referring to OMB Circular A-130, adopted in 1996. If A-130 were proposed today, would it be trashed as socialist? And why has it been so hard to extend its principles from publicly-funded data to publicly-funded research?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/15/2006 01:06:00 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.
