Slowly but relentlessly, the question of how government should encourage people to exploit the vast resources of digital information it holds is creeping above the political horizon. Last week, opposition MPs tabled questions to ministers about what action they plan to take following the Office of Fair Trading's criticisms of the way the public agencies behave in the market for data....
Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign proposes a simple solution: government bodies should make available all data owned or funded by taxpayers, subject to the demands of privacy and security, at the marginal cost of dissemination. In the internet age, this is usually zero. There is a stark contrast between the UK's approach, running parts of government as businesses selling data and the US, where federal data is available for free.
However, an international study carried out for the Office of Fair Trading paints a more complex picture. The study is a rare attempt to perform a consistent analysis of how three different countries' agencies work. They are the US, where federal data is almost all free; Sweden, which has a similar position to Britain's, and Australia, which falls between the two. For each country, the study examines the state mapping, meteorological and companies registration agency. These generate the most commercially exploited public-sector data. But the way they run their businesses varies greatly: Australia's meteorological agency makes a profit of US$6.15m (£3.12m) a year, Sweden's mapping agency US$5.3m. Their US equivalents depend on government funding....
PS: For background, see my post from December 8, 2006.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/22/2006 08:37:00 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.
