The UK government has released The UK Statute Law Database, the first free online edition of the country's consolidated laws. Thanks to Francis Irving, who also provided this comment:
It’s super. Last week, access to consolidated versions of the law of the UK wasn’t possible without paying lots of money. Now it is free.
There are some down sides - 40 acts are not covered at all, law is only guaranteed included up until the end of 2001, and the data only has history of changes back to 1991 (details on status here).
Worse, from the point of view of OKF [Open Knowledge Foundation], the copyright/licensing situation is still not good. Now the data is free as in beer, can we have it free as in speech as well please? (More details in my previous post on the subject)
Update (1/10/07). The source I quoted above has added the following correction: "Thanks to the enquiries of Nick Holmes it has been confirmed that the original copyright notice was a mistake and the database will be fully open, available for anyone to use and reuse under the standard terms of the PSI click-use license. Hurrah!"
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/21/2006 04:49:00 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.
