Open Access at the European Space Agency as part of its Digital Agenda for Space
- Paper number
IAC-17,E1,9,5,x40231
- Author
Mr. Marco Trovatello, ESA, France
- Year
2017
- Abstract
In February 2017 ESA implemented an Open Access policy for its content such as still images, videos and selected sets of data. While for more than two decades, ESA has been sharing vast amounts of information, imagery and data with scientists, industry, media and the public at large via digital platforms such as the web and social media, ESA’s evolving information management policy takes this a step further now. The new Open Access policy for ESA’s information and data facilitates broadest use and reuse of the material for the general public, media, the educational sector, partners and anybody else seeking to utilise and build upon it. It is an important element of ESA's ongoing Space 4.0 strategy to inform, innovate, interact and inspire and accounts for the increasing interest of the general public, giving more insight to the taxpayers in the member states who fund the Agency. ESA has decided to release more contents under the Creative Commons IGO licencing scheme, with the Open Access compliant Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO or, in short, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO licence as the standard. CC IGO licences were designed for use by intergovernmental organisations and allow, in the case of CC BY-SA IGO, for example, content to be widely used on Wikipedia and its media repository Wikimedia Commons Over the past two years, ESA has trialled use of the CC BY-SA IGO licences and released images from the popular Rosetta comet-chasing mission, sets of Mars images as well as other imagery under that credit. ESA's Open Access policy is part of a larger, crucial project: ESA’s Digital Agenda for Space and its core element, the new ESA information management policy, both of which make ESA fit for a fully digital future.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
(absent)