Crown Copyright has been a long-standing copyright protection applied to official works, and at times artistic works, produced under royal or official supervision. In 2006, The Guardian newspaper's Technology section began a "Free Our Data" campaign, calling for data gathered by authorities at public expense to be made freely available for reuse by individuals. In 2010 with the creation of the Open Government Licence and the Data.gov.uk site it appeared that the campaign had been mostly successful, and since 2013 the UK has been consistently named one of the leaders in the open data space.
Despite the UK's leadership position in the open data space, many issues (such as uneven data quality and data literacy) still need to be addressed, but as of 2019 progress has been slow. Some of these issues are addressed in the UK Government's 2017–2020 Government Transformation Strategy.
Open Government Licence
In 2010 the UK Government created the Open Government Licence, and public bodies can now opt to publish their Crown Copyright material under this licence. Material marked in this way is available under a free, perpetual licence without restrictions beyond attribution. This new licence was based on, and designed to work with the Creative Commons licences. Version 2.0 of the licence was released in June 2013 and it was accompanied by a new logo which "at a glance, shows that information can be used and re-used under open licensing".
Data holders Crown Copyright is the default copyright applied to all government department published documents.
Met Office The Met Office is the national weather service. Its main role is to produce forecast models by gathering all the information from weather satellites in space and observations on earth. The principal weather products for UK customers are 36-hour forecasts from the newly-operational 1.5 km resolution UKV model covering the UK and surroundings (replacing the 4 km model), 48-hour forecasts from the 12 km resolution NAE model covering Europe and the North Atlantic, and 144-hour forecasts from the 25 km resolution global model (replacing the 40 km global model). A wide range of other products for other regions of the globe are sold to customers abroad, provided for MOD operations abroad or provided free to developing countries in Africa. This main bulk of data are then passed on to companies who acquire it. Data are stored in the Met Office's own PP-format. The Met Office held the base data involved in the Climatic Research Unit hacking incident and released information to the public alongside the Climatic Research Unit when pressed.
Ordnance Survey Ordnance Survey has been subject to criticisms. Most criticism centres on the point that Ordnance Survey possesses a virtual government monopoly on geographic data in the UK, while, although a government agency, since 1999 it has been required to act as a Trading Fund or commercial entity. This means that it is supposed to be totally self-funding from the commercial sale of its data and derived products – whilst at the same time it is supposed to be the public supplier of geographical information. In 1985 the "Committee of Enquiry into the Handling of Geographic Information" was set up in order to "advise the Secretary of State for the Environment within two years on the future handling of geographic information in the UK, taking account of modern developments in information technology and market needs". The committee's final report was published under the name of its chairman, Roger Chorley, in 1987. The report stressed the importance of widely available geographic information to the UK and recommended a loosening of government policies on distribution and cost recovery.
Ordnance Survey historical works are generally available, as the agency is covered by Crown Copyright: works more than fifty years old, including historic surveys of Britain and Ireland and much of the New Popular Edition, are in the public domain. However, finding suitable originals remains an issue as Ordnance Survey does not provide historical mapping on 'free' terms, instead marketing commercially 'enhanced' reproductions in partnership with Landmark Information Group. This can be contrasted with, for example, the approach in the Republic of Ireland in more recent times, where Ordnance Survey Ireland claims regular copyright over its mapping (and over digital copies of the public domain historical mapping).
Transport Direct Transport Direct is a division of the UK Department for Transport to develop better information technology systems to support public transport. Traveline has created a comprehensive database of all public transport movements in the United Kingdom and it is used to power the Transport Direct Portal. Since the launch of the Portal in December 2004 there have been growing calls for the public transport schedule data, which is generally owned by the transport operator, to be made available as Open data.
The development of Traveline and Transport Direct has created a number of comprehensive national datasets to support the Transport Direct Portal. The assessment of accessibility to services by public transport was made a requirement for the Local Transport Plans in 2004. Measuring the level of accessibility required the use of the data collected by Traveline.
This data are being used by an increasing number of 3rd parties, including Google Transit (South East Traveline Region) and East Anglia / East Midlands Traveline Regions. mySociety's Mapumental accessibility product. During 2010 increasing amounts of data has become available as Open Data including NaPTAN and NPTDR.
Environment Agency Environment Agency provides Open data are through its Spatial Data Catalogue. Lidar and other survey datasets are also available through its Survey Open Data web portal.
United Kingdom Hydrographic Office The UK Hydrographic Office is another data holder in the UK who has been listed by Free Our Data as a government office which is charging for the use of its data that Free Our Data believes should be opened for public use. The UK Hydrographic Office has data on tidal patterns and the position of astronomical bodies used in navigation, as well as being the primary holder of data for nautical charts, not just in the UK but also in many foreign locations, covering features such as bathymetry (depth), wrecks, underwater cables and pipelines, navigation buoys and lighthouses, and coastal features of interest to the mariner. Some of the hydrographic survey data is now being made available through the MEDIN portal as a result of the EU's INSPIRE initiative.
Third-Party Data Repositories Before publicly available data can be analyzed, it needs to be downloaded and imported into a data analysis tool. Furthermore, an analyst will usually need to combine multiple datasets in order to generate a useful analysis. This can be time-consuming if the datasets do not already come in a well-structured machine-readable format, or if they need to be sourced across different organizations. Since this problem is subject to active work in multiple open-data-related projects, UK Government data can be found on platforms other than data.gov.uk, sometimes in a better shape, where users can download it alongside data from other sources. For example, UK Data Service addresses the needs of research users by offering surveys, studies and other relevant data, including surveys and research provided by UK government departments. As another example, Datahub Core offers pre-cleaned small-scale reference and indicator data, including data originally published by the Office for National Statistics and others.
The UK Government itself has recently started addressing this problem by making well-formatted, cleaned datasets available through its data registers service.
History In March 2006 The Guardian newspaper's Technology section began a "Free Our Data" campaign, calling for the raw data gathered by Ordnance Survey (not to mention data gathered on its behalf by local authorities at public expense) to be made freely available for reuse by individuals and companies, as happens, for example, with such data in the USA. However, Ordnance Survey claimed that the quality of the freely available government mapping in the USA is low or variable because of funding issues.
On the 7 April 2006 the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) received a complaint from the data management company Intelligent Addressing. Many, although not all, complaints were upheld by the OPSI, one of the conclusions being that Ordnance Survey "is offering licence terms which unnecessarily restrict competition". Negotiations between Ordnance Survey and interested parties are ongoing with regard to the issues raised by the OPSI report, Ordnance Survey being under no obligation to comply with the report's recommendations.
In June 2006 the Free our data campaign asked "In an age when it is not seen as appropriate for the public sector to run power stations or railways, why is it running nationalised industries in what should be the most dynamic sector of all, the web-based knowledge economy?" And said that "The question lies at the heart of our campaign, which argues that government's role should be to collect and administer high-quality raw data, but make it freely available to everyone to create innovative services". Transport Direct's chief executive, Nick Ilsley, said that research by the department prior to Transport Direct's launch had shown the private sector was not interested in providing a one-stop all-purpose site.
In April 2007, Cabinet Office Minister Hilary Armstrong commissioned Ed Mayo and MySociety director Tom Steinberg to draft a "Power of Information Review" on how the government could serve the public's information needs better. The resulting report led Cabinet Minister Tom Watson, MP to create a 'Power of Information Task Force.
Since August 2007, Ordnance Survey has contracted the political lobbying company Mandate Communications to help campaign against the free data movement and discover which politicians and advisers support Open Data or have questioned Ordnance Survey policies.
In 2008 MySociety requested to OPSI that the dataset should be made available for re-use as Open Data rather than at a charge of £7,500.
In April 2008 Tom Watson MP, Parliamentary Secretary at the Cabinet Office said that pledged to turn upside down the British public's "recipient relationship" with official information.
The 'Power of Information Taskforce Report' was published by the Cabinet Office in February 2009. It reported that although the National Public Transport Data Repository, described itself as ‘Crown Copyright’ investigations showed this database is not actually government data and that the NPTDR charges significant fees for use. The report suggested that there should be a presumption in favour of information which has been created by public sector bodies being available for re-use. They also suggested that there should be a clear and consistent copyright and licensing rules applied making it easy to work with data from multiple sources in the public sector. They recommended a 'Crown Commons' style approach with "highly permissive licensing scheme that is transparent, easy to understand and easy to use, modelled on the 'Click Use' licence".