Assessing the Socioeconomic and Distributional Effects of Open Data Policies: Evidence from the U.S. Landsat Program

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

The world is transitioning to a knowledge economy in which data is a key resource. The extent to which data is made available – for scientific research, operations of government and non-profits, and development of products by the value-added sector – has global implications for economic growth and broad societal benefits. Availability of data – and policies governing the distribution of government-collected and government-generated data in particular – can affect the ability of scientists to access data to conduct research, the ability of government and non-profit entities to access data to develop applications that directly affect citizens around the world, and the health of the value-added commercial sector that uses government data to generate new commercial products. Despite the importance of this issue, there is a lack of research on the impacts of open data policies and the impacts of various types of restrictions on data access. This proposal aims to help to fill that gap through a study focused on the Landsat series of Earth observation satellites, which has generated a relatively consistent data product over its 48-year history, but has experienced a wide variety of data and pricing policies, ranging from full privatization to free and open data provision. This project involves an econometric study of the impact of changes in the cost of Landsat data over time on the distribution of Landsat data to academic, government, and commercial users. While previous studies have noted that the cost of data is a significant barrier to data access and use, this study will go further by providing quantitative insight into the magnitude of this effect on various types of users. It also includes an effort to begin collecting data to examine the feasibility of quantifying and characterizing in detail the way that Landsat data is used in the academic, government, and commercial sectors. This includes identification of relevant academic journal articles, as well as commercial, government, and nonprofit products or activities that rely on Landsat data. The results of this work will provide information that can help to improve the efficiency of data policies for government-collected data. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.