In a remarkable failure of joined-up policymaking, the government has killed off almost all central subsidies for mapmaking. A terse statement from the Department for Communities and Local Government announced that next month it will stop paying Ordnance Survey to survey "uneconomic" parts of Britain such as mountains and moorlands....The agency warns that the subsidy's withdrawal "will have an impact on the currency and content of the rural geography in our products"....Since 1999, Ordnance Survey has received £93.5m through the national interest mapping services agreement, known as Nimsa....
Following last week's announcement, funding will cease entirely in December. A statement by Baroness Andrews, one of the two ministers with responsibility for Ordnance Survey, said that from now on it would be up to public bodies needing geographical data to procure it directly....
In the short term, the ending of Nimsa is bad news for Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign, which argues that data held by bodies such as Ordnance Survey be made freely available for individuals and commercial entities to exploit. This model would require data collection to be funded centrally.
Ending subsidies to Ordnance Survey raises another possibility: that a future government might consider outright privatisation - an option considered and rejected in the 1990s. This would be a disaster for free data. [Robert Barr, an expert in geographical information at Manchester University] suggests an alternative approach: splitting the organisation into two. One division would operate a national geospatial database, funded by the taxpayer and made available to all, while the other would compete freely in the marketplace for maps and other "value added" products.
Another model could be Canada's Geobase project, where since 2001, mapping agencies at different levels of government - federal, provincial and municipal - have agreed to share and make available geospatial data under so-called "copyleft" royalty-free licences. The database, available at the Geobase portal, includes administrative boundaries and height data, which have both been subjects of anguished controversy in Britain....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/09/2006 12:25:00 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.
