Responsibility for policy on Britain's digital crown jewels - data on people, property and the natural environment collected at taxpayers' expense - is split between half a dozen different government departments with widely differing ideas about what they should do with it.
Six months into Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign, lack of central policy has emerged as the biggest barrier to our objective: to make freely available (apart from limits imposed by privacy and national security) all data collected in the course of running public services....
Six months ago, Technology Guardian argued for a single policy: free data. Rather than trying to recover costs by selling data, government agencies should follow the US federal practice of making data available to all comers. Of course, this would kill the current business model of "trading fund" organisations such as Ordnance Survey, which returns a profit to the Treasury. Under free data, such organisations would need a direct subsidy. However, the cost of this subsidy should be set against the savings that would be made by other public bodies receiving data for free - and by growth in the knowledge economy.
Every Thursday over the past six months, we have published at least one Free Our Data case study....
We can claim to have had some impact, too. In June, our debate on free data attracted a capacity crowd at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London. We were nominated for this year's New Statesman new media awards. Last month, the Times published an article in which Gervase Markham of the Mozilla foundation made the case for free data. And last week, the Demographics User Group, representing commercial users of PSI, presented us with its annual award. Thank you. We'll keep plugging away.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/12/2006 04:58:00 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.
