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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: "Ian Thomson" <ithomson.nz AT gmail.com>
  • To: "Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion" <cc-nz AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Cc-nz] cc-nz Digest, Vol 20, Issue 4
  • Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2007 19:22:16 +1200

Hi Sam,

Good to hear this issue raised in this group.

Putting my Community hat on, I made a submission to the Content strategy people saying that if the Government mandate Community Consultation (as they do with Local Government), then access to research data sets is a necessary pre-condition for effective and informed consultation. Throwing a research report at the community is not enough these days.

I also added that the Govt should provide a Mash Up space with appropriate tools for the community to take the datasets and manipulate and interpret them to reach their own conclusions.

This is much better "consultation" than the one way street most communities face today.

As there is nothing about this approach in the latest Content Strategy, and it is promised that this is a living document, how about we do some lobbying to get this included?

Ian

On 18/09/2007, Sam Searle <sam.searle AT mcs.vuw.ac.nz> wrote:
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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> Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand
> http://www.creativecommons.org.nz/
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--
Ian Thomson
Phone +64 (0)27 449 0081


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