On December 1, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) adopted what is essentially an open-access and interoperability policy for weather, water, and climate data. Excerpt from the new policy: 'In furtherance of these policies, NWS [National Weather Service] will carry out activities which contribute to its mission, including collecting and archiving data...and providing unrestricted access to publicly funded observations, analyses, model results, forecasts, and related information products in a timely manner and at the lowest possible cost to users....To advance the weather, water, and climate enterprise, NWS will provide information in forms accessible to the public as well as underlying data in forms convenient to additional processing by others. NWS will make its data and products available in Internet-accessible form to the extent practicable and within resource constraints, and will use other dissemination technologies, e.g. satellite broadcast and NOAA Weather Radio, as appropriate. Information contained in databases will be based on recognized standards, formats, and metadata descriptions to ensure data from different observing platforms, databases, and models can be integrated and used by all interested parties in the weather, water, and climate enterprise.' For more details, see the NOAA press release on the new policy, the comments received during the public comment period, the Slashdot discussion, or our 5/16/04 posting on the National Research Council report, Fair Weather, whose recommendations led to the new policy. (Thanks to Alex Curtis.)
(PS: This policy is a victory for the public interest over private, for-profit weather services, like AccuWeather, who lobbied the government to stop providing free online access to taxpayer-funded weather data. In this way, the new NOAA policy is very analogous to the new NIH policy.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/03/2004 08:43:00 PM.
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.
