Australian Bureau of Statistics to release material under Creative Commons

Yup – buried down in a page that announces changes that will happen to the ABS website  is this small notice:

Creative Commons

Creative Commons provides a spectrum of licensing for the use of intellectual property between full copyright and public domain – in essence ‘some rights reserved’. The ABS is poised to introduce Creative Commons licensing for the majority of its web content.

The relevant Creative Commons logo (which will link to the Attribution 2.5 Australia Licence) will be included at the bottom of every page on the ABS website.

And, yes – you are right …you did read correctly… This information is being released via an Attribution only license. You will soon be able to go forth and remix, repurpose and reuse material created by the ABS. You can even make huge amounts of money by re-selling the information if you can work out how to - just as long as you cite the source of your data.

At the recent LIANZA conference I was very impressed with a paper given by Kietha Booth about how librarians within taxpayer and ratepayer funded organisations should work to help their organisations release their data in free, accessible and re-mixable formats. I’m very, very happy to see this happening in Australia. Should be more of it, I say.

(Thanks to Kate M for giving me the heads up on this one ).