Data should be available at no charge to be truly open. Since businesses’ and citizens’ taxes fund all government activities, including data gathering and management, it is fair to argue that the data has already been paid for by U.S. taxpayers. The proposed Open, Permanent, Electronic, and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act would legislate that principle. But currently, federal agencies can and often do charge for data, limiting its value to industry and inhibiting its use.
Individuals and organizations both in and outside of government often have to pay for essential government data, and the government sometimes charges a prohibitive rate. Panjiva, a company that provides data and analytics on international trade, pays $100 per day for daily updates on U.S. Customs data, which it receives on CDs. Recently a reporter for Quartz, an online news site, requested U.S. immigration data and was told it would cost $173,775. The government agency involved said that it had legal authority to charge for the data, according to the reporter.
Making government data open and accessible free of charge would reduce the barriers for entrepreneurs to start businesses and make small businesses more competitive. It would also enable transformative uses of government data that in turn generate business growth and tax revenues. There are hundreds of documented American businesses whose work is directly supported by open data. As an additional benefit, federal government agencies could end the counterproductive practice of buying data from each other, which incurs the administrative costs of transferring funds to the Treasury Department with no benefit to the agencies or taxpayers.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) should conduct a 100-day review to identify current government datasets that carry significant access fees; determine which of these datasets have the greatest value to businesses, journalists, and the research community; and develop recommendations for eliminating cost barriers for high-priority datasets. GAO should seek input from external stakeholders through a common survey, distributed to key groups and available on data.gov and other open government data websites. Informed by this review, each agency should develop a prioritized list of cost barriers and publicly commit to eliminating these charges in the Fourth Open Government National Action Plan in 2017.
The loss of government revenue from data fees should be greatly outweighed by the benefit of opening data for widespread use. Evidence shows that removing cost barriers can lead to explosive growth in the use of government data. When the U.S. Geological Survey in the Department of the Interior stopped charging for Landsat data, which provides unique spatial imagery and information on the Earth’s composition, use of the data soared from 38 to over 5,700 scenes per day. Users downloaded over 8 million scenes from 2008–2012 after the government made the data available for free. A 2010 survey of over 2,500 people showed that approximately half of all Landsat data users were from the private sector (18 percent) or academia (33 percent). Researchers have used Landsat data to monitor water quality, glacier recession, sea ice movement, invasive species encroachment, coral reef health, land use change, deforestation rates, damage from natural disasters, and population growth.
Some international evidence also supports the immediate benefit of removing cost barriers. In 2002, the Danish Government opened official Danish address data and made it available for free online. Eight years later, the government commissioned a study on the impact of the open address data and found direct financial benefits of EUR 62 million ($69.2 million). Forgoing fees for the data cost the government only EUR 2 million ($2.2 million).