The Data Liberation Initiative is a worthy project that aims to provide academic researchers with affordable and equitable access to Canadian current governmental statistics and other data. I had a chance to meet with three DLI team members back in 2003, and I'm glad to see that the initiative, approved by the Canadian government as a pilot in 1996, has grown into a robust effort with subprojects that benefit the spectrum of public data users. DLI and similar undertakings such as the US government's Fedstats, the Open Data Foundation, and IBM's Many Eyes are what real data liberation is all about.
For the DLI, "liberation" means freedom. Borrowing from another context, "to understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer." Government paid for the data; government employees (and like minded individuals working in industry) feel a responsibility to make sure it's widely and effectively used.
In the case of the DLI, that means backing and participating in the development of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), "an effort to establish an international XML-based standard for the content, presentation, delivery, and preservation of metadata for datasets in the social and behavioral sciences." ...
For the DLI, data liberation means providing direct access to datasets and SAS and SPSS code snippets — those packages are most commonly used for analysis of survey data — to facilitate dataset use. It means maintaining a metadata browser using an interesting tool, Nesstar Webview, developed in Norway and the UK by and for data archivists and their worldwide community of social-science data users they support....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/21/2009 09:44:00 AM.
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.
