BioMed Central Blog
The UK government has in recent years made significant amounts of government data openly available for reuse. They Work for You is an example of a website which creatively reuses data on UK parliamentary activity, and its parent organization, MySociety, has played an important role in encouraging the UK government towards opening up more data.
The latest development in UK government open data sharing is the launch of data.gov.uk, launched in beta test form last month , which “provides a single access point to over 2,500 central government datasets that have been made available for free re-use”.
Buried in the small print of this announcement is an important change, with significant implications for open access publishing in the UK. This change is the adoption of Creative Commons-compatible licensing for UK government open content.
Up until now, open data from the UK government was licensed via the Office of Public Sector Information’s ‘Click Use’ license scheme. The Click Use model required any potential users or distrubutors of the data to first request their own ‘Click Use’ license from the UK government website, in order to gain permission to reuse the data.
In contrast musicians, artists and other creators around the world who wish to share content openly while reserving some rights have increasingly standardized on the use of Creative Commons licenses, which do not require any such license request to be made.
BioMed Central, like many other open access publishers, uses the Creative Commons Attribution License, which requires only that the original version of the work should be correctly attributed when the work or any part of it is reused.
Until now, because work carried out by researchers at UK government agencies is often covered by ‘Crown Copyright’, and because Crown Copyright is legally distinct from the normal Copyright law, the applicability of Creative Commons licenses to such work has been in question. As a result, special license wording has in some cases been necessary for such articles published in BioMed Central journals, in order to indicate that they can be reused only under the ‘Click use’ scheme. This had the potential to cause delays for authors and confusion for readers.
The good news is that the announced intention of OPSI to move away from ‘Click Use’ licensing towards Creative Commons-compatible licensing over the coming months should entirely solve this problem, making life easier for all concerned.
It also provides an important precedent for dealing with similar challenges in other (rather arcane) areas of copyright law. For example, the World Health Organization and other supra-national bodies do not recognize national jurisdictions, which causes similar challenges for Creative Commons licensing to those caused by Crown Copyright, and requires similar workarounds via special-case license wording. BioMed Central is hopeful that a Creative Commons-compatible licensing scheme specifically designed for such supra-national bodies will soon resolve this and we are working with WHO and Creative Commons towards such a solution.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 16:26 Comments (0)