Update: 27 July 2017
Good news: Following my post below NHS Digital have tweeted to say that they are currently working to improve their website and are in the process of reviewing their T&Cs to be in line with the terms of the OGL.
Post: 25 July 2017
This post is a run-through of problems with the terms and conditions on NHS Digital’s website. These T&Cs currently apply to all statistics, data and other material on the site including the new GP Data Hub.
I mentioned the NHS Digital T&Cs in a recent Twitter discussion, as an example of a public body adding non-open terms to the Open Government Licence.
The T&Cs set out a licence for re-use of information on the NHS Digital website, in three parts: a preamble that summarises the OGL, a middle section that sets out NHS Digital’s own terms (paraphrasing the OGL in places), and a final section “about” the OGL.
The T&Cs don’t explicitly say the website’s information is subject to the OGL, so it’s not quite clear whether NHS Digital intended to apply the OGL as amended by its own terms or to apply its own terms in place of the OGL (in which case the OGL references are redundant).
Either way the result is a licence that does not conform to the Open Definition.
NHS Digital’s T&Cs seem to be quite old, as they refer to version 1.0 of the OGL. There’s a second page on the NHS Digital site with the same T&Cs but with references to HSCIC, NHS Digital’s previous name. Some of the additional terms seem to be from an older HSCIC site that did not mention the OGL.
NHS Digital terms vs open licensing
These are the main differences between NHS Digital’s T&Cs and an open licence:
1. The requirement to “reproduce the information accurately” conflicts with the Open Definition requirement to allow use of the information for any purpose. An open licence must not “restrict anyone from making use of the work in a specific field of endeavour”.
2. Similarly the requirements not to “use the information in a misleading way” and not to “use the information for the principal purpose of advertising or promoting a particular product or service” conflict with the Open Definition requirement to allow use of the information for any purpose.
3. The requirement to reproduce the information “without amendment or alteration” conflicts with the Open Definition requirements to allow modification and separation of the information.
4. The use of “all rights reserved” in the attribution statement, while not a licensing term in itself, lacks coherence in the context of open re-use. See my previous blog post.
Recommendations
The current NHS Digital T&Cs present a difficulty for open data users.
At a glance, users unfamiliar with the Open Government Licence are likely to get the impression either than material on the website is covered by the OGL or that NHS Digital’s T&Cs set out the terms of the OGL.
Adding significant terms to the OGL means that any datasets covered by those terms cannot be mixed with data from properly open datasets (i.e. those covered by the unamended OGL or other compliant open licences) and redistributed as open data.
NHS Digital presents itself as a supporter of open data and has listed hundreds of datasets on Data.gov.uk as re-usable under the Open Government Licence. The website T&Cs undermine this approach.
I urge NHS Digital to update its website terms and conditions with a simple statement that all content is made available for re-use under the Open Government Licence v3.0, except where otherwise stated.