The Polish Ministry of Administration and Digitization is to consult the Bill on Openness of Public Resources

During today’s press conference, the Ministry of Administration and Digitization has announced its works on the Bill on Openness of Public Resources.

The press materials read: „Opening of public resources means public institutions making the collections of books, science articles, databases, photographs, works of art, film and music recordings that they have gathered available to the public. The Internet creates unique opportunities to make this knowledge widely accessible so that public resources are available to anyone who is interested in using them the same way they now use Wikipedia”. We are pleased to see this way of comprehending the issue of openness. It is significantly different from the stance presented recently by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. The contents of Wikipedia articles are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike free license. I think that it would be excellent for the development of culture in Poland if materials made available by public institutions as part of the law on public resources opening were published under a similar free license, especially that the Ministry of Administration and Digitization has promised 10 billion PLN to fund the opening of the resources. The Modern Poland Foundation is pleased that Wolne Lektury has been listed among the examples of open resources. A month-long public consultation is to commence next week.

translation: Monika Szewczyk