Open Government Licence

The Open Government Licence (OGL) is a free licence for government data, content and source code created by the UK government.

It is considered a free content licence and, according to the OGL deed, compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution licence. This in turn makes it compatible with the requirements of *most* Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons.

Because of the Attribution clause and the licensing of Wikidata under either CC0 (main and property namespace) and CC BY-SA (other namespaces), the OGL might be compatible with Wikidata's licensing, depending on the way the data is introduced.

This page is to help co-ordinate porting of OGL-licensed content from UK government websites and publications to Wikimedia projects, specifically Wikimedia Commons for photographs, illustrations, sound files, video files and other multimedia content, and Wikisource for text content. Learning materials can be reused by Wikiversity. The other Wikimedia hosted projects including Wikipedia, Wikibooks and Wikiquote may also find new material they can incorporate into their projects. Having up-to-date political images also helps Wikinews and the news and current affairs community on Wikipedia.

There is continual reviewing of the OGL licensing framework, and interested Wikimedians and others in the United Kingdom may wish to get involved in any future consultation with the government over the future of the OGL and the Public Service Information licensing framework.

Scope of the OGL and PSI licensing framework

The OGL covers material published by government departments under Crown Copyright.

It does not cover material that fall into the stated Exemptions:

• personal data
• "Information that has neither been published nor disclosed under information access legislation (including the Freedom of Information Acts for the UK and Scotland) by or with the consent of the Information Provider"
• "departmental or public sector organisation logos, crests and the Royal Arms except where they form an integral part of a document or dataset"
• military insignia
• "third party rights the Information Provider is not authorised to license"
• "Information subject to other intellectual property rights, including patents, trademarks, and design rights"
• "identity documents such as the British Passport"

It does not cover material published by executive non-departmental public bodies like, say, the British Library or English Heritage.

It does not cover material published by Parliament as this is licensed under Parliamentary Copyright rather than Crown Copyright.

Unless specified otherwise, the PSI reuse framework does not cover material published by the Monarchy even though they publish material under Crown Copyright.

It also does not cover material published by the Church of England.

Use on Wikimedia

• The text of the OGL is available under the OGL on Wikisource.
• On Wikimedia Commons, all images and other media files that are being reused under the OGL are available in the OGL category. Use template {{OGL}} for OGL version 1, or {{OGL2}} or {{OGL3}}, as appropriate.
• On English Wikipedia, articles where OGL text has been imported are in Category:Articles with imported Open Government Licence 1.0 text (populated via {{OGL-text}}). OGL files on English Wikipedia are in Category:Open Government Licence files (populated via {{OGL}}), but as they are free files they can be moved to Commons.
• On English Wikisource, OGL material is in Category:OGL and the template {{ogl}} can be used on the talk page to designate a work as OGL.
• Issues related to the use of OGL material can be listed on the talk page.

Government agencies, departments and institutions

Name	Can reuse?	Information pages	Content pages	Project reuse	Notes
Department for International Development	Yes	[1]	Flickr	Commons cat
Met Office	No		Flickr
Office for National Statistics	Yes	Information page on the ONS website	Flickr	Commons Category

To-do list

• Department for Education publications to Wikisource (and Commons for graphics)
• Ordnance Survey - announcement
• Cheshire Open Data - licence page

Government publications requiring clarification

• Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS)
  • Q: Claims to be Crown Copyright, but also sells photographs (both prints and digital images) and solicits user contributions on Flickr. Now the OGL is in place, what is the copyright situation of the images of the images RCAHMS deals with?
    • A: A Government agent or department that provides an official release of materials on an Open Government Licence would be unable to revoke the release, or make a future claim of damages against any users or re-publishers of the material. The OGL does not automatically supersede other licences, such as Crown Copyright, so if the OGL is not quoted covering the published material, this requires written confirmation before reuse under the OGL.

Government Flickr accounts and their status

• Number 10
  • This stream contains a mixture of images and has been the source of a great number of Commons Deletion Requests. Some of the photos are marked as CC BY-NC-ND on Flickr but are OGL as a result of the PSI Reuse Framework grant while others are not freely licensed if the description attributes it to an external body - e.g. "PA copyright" (see commons:Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Sheikh_Hasina_with_David_Cameron.jpg for example).
• Department for Education Flickr stream
  • This stream contains a large quantity of images produced by the DfE which could be copied onto Commons if they were OGL licenced. —Tom Morris (talk) 08:50, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
• Department of Health Flickr stream
• FCO Flickr streams (see Template:FCO)
• Scottish Government (linked from scotland.gov.uk)
  • They have licensed their images under Attribution-NonCommercial on Flickr, which is a non-free licence. Does the OGL override this?
  • On the Flickr profile, it lists "All images are subject to Crown copyright otherwise otherwise indicated."
• Department for Business, Industry and Skills
  • Photos on there are licensed with a mixture of CC BY-ND and CC BY-NC-ND (both are not considered free content licenses by Wikimedia) but the ministerial portraits are licensed under Crown Copyright (and thus OGL) and CC BY-NC-ND.
• Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS)
  • Photos in this account are all under CC BY-NC-ND, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere claiming they are Crown Copyright (and thus OGL).
• NI Environment Agency
  • On Flickr, "All rights reserved". Copyright statement says "You may use and re-use the information featured on this website (not including logos) free of charge in any format or medium, under the terms of the Open Government Licence."
• Transport Scotland (terms and conditions)
  • On Flickr, "All rights reserved".
  • "Images and photographs on this site are subject to Crown copyright protection unless otherwise indicated. You may re-use Crown copyright images subject to the conditions stated above. Images and videos on Transport Scotland's Flickr site and YouTube channel are subject to the licence restrictions shown on those sites, but are normally available to be re-used with attribution for non-commercial purposes only."
• Driving Standards Agency (terms and conditions)
• DEFRA (terms and conditions)
• Department for Communities and Local Government

Things we can't reuse

• Flickr: British Monarchy (announcement)
  • The Monarchy are not covered by the OGL.
• the OGL logo
  • While this logo is also Crown Copyrighted, it's confirmed by the National Archives that this logo is not covered under the Open Government Licence, or other free licences like Creative Commons. This was also discussed on Commons: c:Commons:Deletion requests/File:OpenGovernmentLicence.svg.

It's complicated!

• Food Standards Agency
  • Copyright statement says that you can reuse material other than logos and images.

External links

• Open Government Licence
• UK Government Licensing Framework for public sector information
• Archives announcement
• data.gov.uk announcement
• Attributions and acknowledging the source - advice from the National Archives about attribution