One of the Department for Transport's (DfT) principal aims is to cut road deaths by 40% by 2010. And since excess speed is a known contributor to accidents, would a database of national speed limits, available for free, help achieve that aim? The answer is not as obvious as it might seem, according to Professor Frank Kelly, the outgoing chief scientific adviser to the DfT. It's not just a question of whether data should be "free"; just as important is the question of who should contribute to the data, and whether it needs to be "owned".
In fact the problem is not technological, acording to Professor David Rhind, formerly director-general of Ordnance Survey and now vice-chancellor of the University of London. "The problem lies elsewhere and it is about policy coherence, intellectual property rights and much else," he noted in an article for last September’s Journal of the Foundation for Science and Technology....Ideally, he added, the DfT would like to make all the speed limit data - "including the coordinates [of where speed limits change on the roads] freely available; that is, free from copyright and easily shareable, in the public domain." But, Rhind adds, "this appears to be enormously difficult". One important reason: the obstacle that government ownership of geographic data places on its reuse....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/03/2006 12:06:00 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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
