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 compatible with the requirements of all Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons. The OGL is compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution licence.

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.

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 {{OGL}} on Commons.
• 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 images on English Wikipedia are in Category:Open Government Licence images (populated via {{OGL}}), but as they are free images 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.

To-do list

• DFID photos (terms and conditions)
  • Their Flickr stream is CC BY. Their website explicitly acknowledges that you can reuse Crown Copyright material under the OGL.
  • Please place all images in Category:Images from Department for International Development on Commons.
• 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)
  • 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?

Government Flickr accounts

• 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
• Met Office (linked from metoffice.gov.uk)
  • Met Office has an exception to OGL/PSI framework
• 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.

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
• National Archives announcement
• data.gov.uk announcement
• Attributions and acknowledging the source - advice from the National Archives about attribution