The Open Knowledge Foundation
has made an announcement concerning the launch of the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science. The Foundation states that open data should be data that are “freely available on the public internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyse, re-process, pass them to software or use them for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers…” and that accordingly data relating to published science should be available in the public domain. The Principles themselves hold that the legal status of scientific datasets should be explicit and that content licences are not appropriate for data. The first draft of the Panton Principles was written in July 2009 by Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, Rufus Pollock and John Wilbanks and were refined with the assistance of the members of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Open Data in Science.