Far from charging us for the data it collects, the Government should encourage us to use it freely...Don't you hate it when you have to pay for something twice? ...
Until 1999, the Ordnance Survey, the British Government's mapping arm, was funded by the taxpayer to make detailed maps of the entire country. These days, they sell limited-use licences to this national asset on a "cost recovery" basis. So, having paid my taxes, when I buy an OS map to go walking in the Lakes, I have the privilege of paying again....
In the US, by contrast, geospatial data collected by federal agencies are placed in the public domain. This allows the creation of cool, free-to-access services such as gsmloc.org, which is building a comprehensive database of GSM cell towers to allow people to locate themselves without a GPS, and Gutenkarte, a weird combination of Project Gutenberg e-texts and maps which shows you all the geographic locations mentioned in a particular book. Check out Around the World in 80 Days.
So what might happen if we adopted the American approach? A lot more than a few mash-ups.
A study in 2000 estimated that, although the US Government spends twice as much on data collection as the EU countries, but the economic value generated by businesses using it was more than ten times greater – €750 billion. That's billion, not million. Was the analysis done by self-justifying American civil servants or biased open-geodata activists? No, it was done by the EU itself. You would have thought that most governments would jump at a share in a multi-hundred-billion-euro fillip for their economies.
A further irony about the short-sighted "cost recovery" policy is that, again using the Ordnance Survey as an example, 60 per cent of its data sales are back to the Government itself. This is not cost recovery, it's merely moving cash around the system. Although free and open data distribution would mean the Survey would need explicit funding, the increased tax revenue from the economic activity generated would more than pay for the additional cost (again, according to the EU study). That's joined-up government. We have some of the highest quality mapping data in the world; the possibilities are limited only by the imagination.
Natural justice and hard-nosed economics agree – Ordnance Survey and other government data, in open formats and under open licences, should be made available, free to all.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/20/2006 09:52:00 AM.
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.
