Here is my response to Canada's Open Government Consultation. Please note that responses are due by January 16, 2011!
Open Government Consultation – Response from Independent Scholar
First,
congratulations and kudos to the Government of Canada for actively
participating in the Open Government movement, and for providing this
opportunity for citizens to be involved in this consultation. I speak as an independent
scholar and librarian.
Open data
The keys to
making open data as useful as it could be are to use open and interoperable
formats and best practices for licensing. Because both are evolving, my
suggestion is to just get the data up there and available with the best format
and license for now, realizing that worldwide standards are likely to change
over the next few years.
Opendata.bc
provides a widely recognized good model for licensing of open data http://www.opendatabc.ca/
The
European Commission’s Open Data Strategy is one that I recommend consulting:
My
interests cover the range of scholarly knowledge; any and all of the open data
sets mentioned would be most helpful.
In addition,
I would strongly suggest that datasets resulting from research funded by
Canada’s federal funding agencies be required to be made openly available as
soon as possible after collection, with appropriate privacy safeguards in the
case of research involving human subjects.
Open Information
It is
timely for the government to expand the agenda-setting Canadian Institutes of
Health Research’s Policy on Access to
Research Outputs to all federal research funding agencies. Research funded
by the Canadian taxpayer should be freely available to all. The optimum mandate
would require deposit of the author’s final peer-reviewed research scholarly
articles into an open access archive at a university (and/or PubMedCentral
Canada), immediately on acceptance for publication. In the short term, an
embargo date of up to 6 months might be set to allow scholarly publishers time
to adjust to the growing environment of open access in scholarly communication.
As a
librarian, I know that reports commissioned by the Government of Canada and
information submitted to Parliament by departments and agencies often contain
essential research or other information (that’s why these reports get funded in
the first place), that are useful far beyond the original reason for
commissioning the reports. To get full value from these reports, these reports
should retained, archived, and made accessible. Ideally, today, this means
putting the reports online for open access. Librarians are uniquely skilled in
collecting such reports, preservation, and making the works accessible online,
by providing expert metadata, and assistance to researchers. I urge the federal
government to encourage and help its libraries to transition to a role of
providers of information online.
Open Dialogue
In 2010, I
actively participated in the consultation on Canada’s Digital Economy Strategy,
and commented at the time that this is an enlightened approach.
For someone
like me, it is reasonably easy to find out about and participate in these sorts
of consultations. However, I am a scholar whose work is closely related to the
internet and public policy; I am often on the web and on the alert for messages
about such consultations, and have a strong background for participation. I am
not sure that all of this is true for most people in Canada, or would even be
true for me at a different stage in life.
What I see as needed is active outreach. People need to understand the
issues before they can provide fully informed opinions. Web-based consultations
need to provide a means for people without ready access to the internet at home
to participate. Public libraries can play an important role in this arena. We
need to keep in mind that not every community is connected to the internet;
other means are needed to engage these citizens.
Final Comments: Open Government
Strategy
Are there
approaches used by other governments that you believe the Government of Canada
could / should model?
Yes! The
United States has provided the whole world with an outstanding example in the
freely available PubMed index and PubMedCentral fulltext archive. PubMed is the
world’s premiere medical index; as recently as the 1990’s, I worked at a
library at a small university college in Canada that could not afford to
purchase access to what was then called Medline. Today, this index is freely
available, around the world, to anyone with an Internet connection. Thanks to
the policies of medical research funding agencies (including the U.S. National
Institutes of Health, Wellcome Trust, and the Canadian Institutes of Health
Research, among many others), requiring public access to the results of
research that they fund, 20% of the world’s medical literature is now freely
available within two years of publication. This expanded access makes an
enormous difference in finding solutions to medical problems. I am proud that
Canada is one of the first countries to participate in the envisioned
PubMedCentral international, through PMC-Canada.
As
mentioned above, I recommend looking at:
Opendata.bc
http://www.opendatabc.ca/
The
European Commission’s Open Data Strategy http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/11/1524&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en
Also, the
City of Vancouver’s Open Data initiative:
Again,
thanks for the opportunity to participate.
Heather
Morrison
Vancouver,
BC
Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser
University School of Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic
Economics
Privacy note: the above links are
to publicly available sites.
This is a response to the
Canadian government’s Open Government Consultation http://open.gc.ca/index-eng.asp
January 6, 2012
