Friends: Shoud we not free data? I mean make research and other data freely available to whoever needs them. A number of scientists (including Dr K Sekar of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston, economist Paul A David, Prof. Suichi Iwata of CODATA and a very large number of others) are helping free data. The National Knowledge Commission might wish to frame policies and recommendations on three RELATED issues, viz. Open Source Software, Open Access to Scientific and Scholarly Literature, and Open Data. Please read on an excerpt from an article in The Guardian (courtesy Peter Suber): More on OA to data Glyn Moody, The Dream of Open Data, Open..., March 9, 2006. Excerpt: Today's Guardian has a fine piece by Charles Arthur and Michael Cross about making data paid for by the UK public freely accessible by them. [PS: see my blogged excerpt.] But it goes beyond merely detailing the problem, and represents the launch of a campaign called "Free Our Data". It's particularly good news that the unnecessary hoarding of data is being addressed by a high-profile title like the Guardian, since a few people in the UK Government might actually read it. It is rather ironic that at a time when nobody outside Redmond disputes the power of open source, and when open access is almost at the tipping point, open data remains something of a distant dream. Indeed, it is striking how advanced the genomics community is in this respect. As I discovered when I wrote Digital Code of Life, most scientists in this field have been routinely making their data freely available since 1996, when the Bermuda Principles were drawn up. The first of these stated: It was agreed that all human genomic sequence information, generated by centres funded for large-scale human sequencing, should be freely available and in the public domain in order to encourage research and development and to maximise its benefit to society. The same should really be true for all kinds of large-scale data that require governmental-scale gathering operations. Since they cannot be feasibly gathered by private companies, such data ends up as a government monopoly. But trying to exploit that monopoly by crudely over-charging for the data is counter-productive, as the Guardian article quantifies. Let's hope the campaign gathers some momentum - I'll certainly being doing my bit. ---- Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam]