The other day I went there to investigate their licensing as part of an effort to do a simple survey of the openness of various UK government agency’s data. To summarize their copyright statement (full details are in 1):
National statistics are under Crown Copyright
If you want to reproduce the statistics other than for research or private study you need a ‘core’ (now called PSI) click-use license
This is where it gets interesting. According to the PSI license (which I’ve textified and posted [here]):
“In this Licence, to reproduce includes the following non-exclusive rights throughout the world:
6.1 publishing the Material in any medium. This includes featuring the Material on websites which can be accessed via the internet or via an internal electronic network or on an Intranet;”
This seems to be pretty broad and cover anything I’d like to do....If this licence was effective it would mean that the data was open. However further down the National Statistics copyright page one finds:
“Customers wishing to repackage and/or redistribute National Statistics material in their own products or services and allow their customers to use such material should contact msolicensing@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk with details of their request.”
This seems to imply that repackaging and redistribution require separate permission and are not covered by the PSI licence. If this is the case the freedom to reproduce granted in the click-use license is rendered completely void. All of this makes me wonder whether the National Statistics UK are able to see some special distinction between ‘reproduction’ and ‘repackaging/redistributing’ that’s not apparent to the rest of us.
Comment. One of the chief benefits of making information OA is that users are spared the expense and delay of asking permission to make use of it. Some providers understand this and provide blanket permission for certain uses in advance. However, what they don't always realize is that this benefit is completely negated when the permission is vague or inconsistent. Then conscientious users will still have to ask permission, denting their productivity, sometimes denting their budget, and increasing the unrelenting pressure to become less conscientious.
One of my favorite examples is a June 2004 policy by Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP) allowing authors to self-archive JHUP journal articles in their institutional repository "provided the [repository] does not directly compete with either the Johns Hopkins University Press or Project Muse."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/30/2006 12:47:00 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.
