Charges for data
The licence charges that NERC can levy for the supply of data and information are governed by HM Treasury guidance and Government regulations.
The NERC charging regime recognises two classes of data:
- Raw or unrefined - these are data collected (or held) by NERC, with any necessary quality assurance or post processing applied, and used to deliver NERC's public function;
- Value added or refined - these are data where an extra level of intellectual input has been added, for example, by combining a number of data sets together, or producing an information product by the interpretation of a number of data sets, and crucially, is above and beyond what is required to deliver NERC's public function.
For 'raw' data, NERC will only charge the marginal cost of supply, and will put no restrictions on further use. For 'value added' data NERC will charge on a cost recovery basis. This is the cost of maintaining and supplying the value added product and not the cost of the initial data collection.
NERC wishes to ensure that its holdings of data are freely available to the academic community; i.e. those whose research is solely to advance knowledge and not for commercial gain, and who will publish their results in the open literature. During 2010 NERC aims to move to a position where it will supply its data for free for all teaching and research activities, apart from large or complex requests where we may make a nominal handling charge.
NERC aims to be open, transparent and innovative in how it charges and licences for access to its data holdings. This approach is fundamental to the Office of Public Sector Information's Information Fair Trader Scheme accreditation, held by BGS since 2003. NERC's other research centres are now working to gain IFTS accreditation, where appropriate.
As part of NERC's aim to support the development of innovative uses for the data it holds, it is starting to supply a number of data sets for commercial innovation under a Creative Commons type non-transactional licence arrangement. For example, BGS supply the DiGMapGB-625 data set free via the BGS web site for personal, teaching, and academic use, and for commercial innovation. BGS also supply the DiGMapGB-50 data set entirely free of charge as a WMS view service via its OpenGeoscience gateway for personal, teaching, and academic use, and for commercial innovation.
Full details are given in the NERC data policy.