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cc-nz - Re: [Cc-nz] cc-nz Digest, Vol 20, Issue 4

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Subject: Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

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  • From: Sam Searle <sam.searle AT mcs.vuw.ac.nz>
  • To: cc-nz AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Cc-nz] cc-nz Digest, Vol 20, Issue 4
  • Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2007 09:37:47 +1200

This is a huge issue and deserves some big discussions at a national level, and I'm keen to hear from others in this community about how to prompt those discussions. During my work on the Advanced Network Capability Building Roadmap, data storage / management / re-use emerged as probably the biggest issue facing e-research development in NZ.

At a recent eResearch conference in Brisbane, issues about open access to datasets were a hot topic for discussion: the Aussies are going all out on this and spending something like 50 million on an Australian National Data Service, that will establish distributed technologies and policy frameworks to make their research data accessible.

Here in New Zealand, I think it would be fair to say that research datasets seem to have fallen through the cracks. There is a lot of focus (e.g. in the Digital Content Strategy and ICT Framework for Education, National Library's National Digital Heritage Archive) on institutional repositories for research outputs and on repositories of digital content, but mostly these seem to be framed in terms of published knowledge rather than raw data. We don't have a history of discipline-based data archives the way other countries do (probably because such centres tend to be funded by the research councils for those disciplines!): with my librarian hat on for a minute, it also worries me that the skillsets required to do this work (a combination of technical skills, archival understanding, and domain knowledge) are very rare.

Trends internationally are for policy agencies and funders to make open access to publicly-funded research datasets mandatory.
Here in NZ we are slightly behind the US, UK and Australia and lots of other places in looking at this, but I believe that there are discussions happening at MoRST/FRST along these lines. Not many people are aware that NZ signed up to the OECD's Declaration on Access to Research Data from Public Funding in 2004 - http://www.oecd.org/document/15/0,2340,en_21571361_21590465_25998799_1_1_1_1,00.html - not much has happened since then but I would expect it to soon.

I'm not sure about Stats, LINZ - it would be interesting to know if they are heading in this direction.

Amongst the Crown Research Institutes, only NIWA so far seems to be anticipating the (inevitable) policy and funding changes: in July they announced a free data policy - http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0707/S00011.htm - with which they are aiming to "encourage further scientific discovery and contribute to good natural resource planning and decision-making by giving everyone easy access to quality assured, scientific natural resources data." Go, NIWA!

Internationally, in the sciences at least, people seem to be looking at the Science Commons project as a model for the future: http://sciencecommons.org/resources/faq/databases/

And public pressure certainly does seem to be working - in the UK, the Guardian's Free Our Data campaign (http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/) has been really successful in brining these issues to public attention.

Cheers
Sam


Sam Searle
E-Research Development Coordinator
Room 235, Cotton Building
Victoria University of Wellington
PO Box 600, Wellington 6140, New Zealand
Tel +64 4 463 6613 Fax +64-4-463 5045
E-mail sam.searle AT vuw.ac.nz
Calendar http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~sam/calendar.html

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject:
[Cc-nz] Open Data License
From:
"Mark Rickerby" <maetl AT coretxt.net.nz>
Date:
Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:50:36 +1200
To:
cc-nz AT lists.ibiblio.org

To:
cc-nz AT lists.ibiblio.org


One question that was raised at the EGovernment BarCamp conference on
Saturday was in terms of the difference between 'free' and 'open', and
the need for clear guidelines for licensing content that is a 'data
set' or 'database' rather than a single document or authored work.

Specific examples are taxpayer funded data sets such as the registry
of flora and fauna. There is a huge amount of public data available,
but no real common standard for licensing it. Currently, each agency
uses their own specific copyright statement which either allows or
disallows public use.

For example, Statistics NZ has a copyright statement which seems to be
a reflection of an "Attribution" style license:

http://www.stats.govt.nz/copyright.htm

So I'm wondering whether or not Open Data comes within the scope of CC
licensing schemes, and in particular the NZ Creative Commons
initiative? One suggestion I have seen for open data sets is 'modding'
a standard CC license to include database rights, eg:

http://creativecommons.org/worldwide/nl/english-changes.pdf

Having something like this would also be a good encouragement for
agencies to release more data to the public, with a clear set of terms
for what end users are allowed to do with it.

Regards,
Mark



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