Open Access News

News from the open access movement

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

The UK census will spend �12 million to produce a national list of addresses -- and never use it again.
The omnibus appropriations bill signed by President Obama (which also included a clause to make the NIH Public Access Policy permanent) included a provision to restore previous reporting rules on releases of toxic information. (See also our past posts on the Toxics Release Inventory.)
The Show Us the Data campaign released its list of the most wanted government information. CRS reports and PACER documents come in toward the top. See our past posts on Show Us the Data, CRS, and PACER.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder released new guidelines on the Freedom of Information Act that includes a "presumption of openness" for federal agencies. See comments by EFF, CDT, and ALA. President Barack Obama had called for the guidelines in an earlier memo.
Report language in the omnibus appropriations bill signed by President Obama called for a study on the feasibility of bulk downloads (e.g. via API) of Congressional data.
Recovery.gov is using a Creative Commons Attribution license for any third-party content on the site, following in the lead of WhiteHouse.gov.
The implementation instructions for U.S. agencies distributing stimulus funds include RSS feeds of reported information by agency. Meanwhile, new federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra wants to create a government-wide repository of feeds, nicknamed data.gov.
Public Printer Robert C. Tapella released a letter to President Obama detailing how the Government Printing Office can support transparency initiatives. See our past posts on GPO.
The EFF released a tool to search documents retrieved through the organization's public records requests.
Newsweek has a story on the movement for APIs to public data. (Thanks to Free Government Information.) Meanwhile, a Science Progress column calls for opening public data.
Wired created an entry on its How-To Wiki, Open Up Government Data, to collect advice on the topic.

Posted by Gavin Baker at 3/24/2009 07:22:00 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.