[open-data-handbook] Wording relating to cost of data?

Tue Mar 19 07:15:07 UTC 2013

Hi!

In the ODH there are some places where cost of access to data is
discussed. From time to time I meet people who are confused regarding
the possibility of charging for data.

For example this page has ambiguous statements:
http://opendatahandbook.org/en/what-is-open-data/index.html

"Open data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed
by anyone - subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and
sharealike."

and in the first bullet point below:

"Availability and Access: the data must be available as a whole and at
no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably by downloading
over the internet."

So in the first paragraph it is free but in the bullet point it seems
like it is OK to charge for data. The second statement has been used
as an argument by people from a gvmt agency that have a business model
where a single row of data about costs 0.6 EUR. (getting the entire
database would cost around 400 000 EUR). As "open data" is gaining in
popularity they like to be part of that and thus consider the 0.6 EUR
a "reasonable reproduction cost".

I think the Open data handbook has to be clarified to reduce
ambiguity. Expensive data is not open data and maybe open data
definitions need to be at the "end of the scale" stressing that data
need to be free to be truly open. Experience from discussions about
software patents (RAND terms etc) shows that "Reasonable" can mean
very different things to different people.

As a second alternative ambiguity can be reduced be providing an
example of what "reasonable reproduction costs" can be, maybe by
explaining the cost of the medium (e.g. a DVD) and that it only
applies to a dataset as a whole.

/Peter