Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

[Sam Searle <sam.searle AT mcs.vuw.ac.nz>]

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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