The following guest post is from Owen Stephens, who is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data.

Discovery is a new JISC funded initiative to help realise a vision set out in 2010 by the JISC and Research Libraries UK (RLUK) ‘Resource Discovery Taskforce’ (RDTF).

The RDTF Vision is about making resources more discoverable, accessible, and usable by both people and machines. The Discovery initiative seeks to realise the vision by engaging libraries, museums and archives and building a critical mass of freely available, quality, data which can be used to build compelling applications and inspire others to both contribute and use data to build what Discovery describes as a ‘metadata ecology’ for UK education and research.

Key to realising the vision is ‘open’ metadata, and at the Discovery launch event at the Wellcome Trust in London on the 26th May the Discovery ‘Open Metadata Principles’ were announced. The principles recommend that institutions should presume their metadata is by default made freely available for use and reuse, and advocate clear licensing for metadata, specifically the use of the standard Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication & Licence (ODC-PDDL), the broadly similar Creative Commons CC0 licence or the UK Open Government Licence (OGL).

The Open Metadata Principles are supported by both the existing JISC guide to Open Bibliographic Data and a new practical guide to Licensing Open Data. Initial signatories to the principles include representatives from the JISC, the British Library, the UK National Archives, RLUK, SCONUL, the National Library of Wales, the Collections Trust and the British Universities Film and Video Council. A full list of signatories to the principles is available at http://discovery.ac.uk/businesscase/principles/.

Discovery will continue to engage with those wishing to contribute and use data to create resource discovery services based on a rich set of open metadata published using a clear set of principles and practices. So whether you are building a business case to release data, building applications or just want to know more about Discovery, visit and track #ukdiscovery for more information and announcements.

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