{"id":"UkOpenGovernmentLicenseForPublicSectorInformation","title":"UK Open Government License for Public Sector Information","reviewed_on":"2026-09-15","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"corrected","summary":"The record models version 3.0 of the UK Open Government Licence, confirmed from the legal text itself, which closes with \"This is version 3.0 of the Open Government Licence\". The permissive side of the model is right. Applied: the SPDX identifier OGL-UK-3.0, the licence-notice duty and the modified-works permission. Two prohibitions that the text does not support, share alike and add statement, are proposed for removal; they are shared with the Open Supreme Court Licence and the Canadian Open Government Licence.","findings":[{"rubric":1,"severity":"minor","field":"spdx:licenseId","description":"The record carried no SPDX identifier. cc:legalcode is the seeAlso URL of the SPDX entry OGL-UK-3.0, Open Government Licence v3.0, and the fetched text confirms the version. The proposal file rated this medium on the URL alone; the version statement in the document makes it certain. Added.","action":"applied","change":"spdx:licenseId \"OGL-UK-3.0\" ;"},{"rubric":1,"severity":"info","field":"cc:legalcode","description":"cc:legalcode and dct:source are the same National Archives URL, which redirects to https and resolves. The http form is the one SPDX lists, so it was left unchanged.","action":"none"},{"rubric":2,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:target","description":"The asset collection is dalicc:CreativeWork, dcmitype:Dataset and dcmitype:Software. The family-rule baseline flags the software type on the National Archives records as suspect; the text settles it in favour of keeping it: the licence defines \"Information\" as \"information protected by copyright or by database right (for example, literary and artistic works, content, data and source code)\", so source code is expressly in scope.","action":"none"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:permission","description":"The permissions follow the freedoms list: copy, publish, distribute and transmit the Information; adapt the Information; and exploit it commercially and non-commercially. odrl:grantUse, dalicc:chargeDistributionFee and dalicc:chargeLicenseFee all rest on the commercial exploitation freedom and on the absence of any onward-licensing restriction. dalicc:noWarrantyNotice rests on the no-warranty section.","action":"none"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"dalicc:ModifiedWorks, distributing a modified version and making it available to the public, was missing although the licence permits adapting the Information and publishing, distributing and transmitting it in the same list, and the sibling record NCGL-UK-2.0 carries the permission on the identical wording. Added.","action":"applied","change":"odrl:permission [ a odrl:Permission ;\n        odrl:action dalicc:ModifiedWorks ] ;"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:duty","description":"The licence requires two things when the information is used and the record modelled only one. Section \"You must (where you do any of the above)\": \"acknowledge the source of the Information in your product or application by including or linking to any attribution statement specified by the Information Provider(s) and, where possible, provide a link to this licence\", with the default statement \"Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.\" cc:Attribution was attached to cc:DerivativeWorks and odrl:distribute; cc:Notice was missing everywhere, although the attribution statement is itself a licence notice and the licence asks for a link to itself. Added next to cc:Attribution in both permissions, which is how the sibling record NCGL-UK-2.0 models the same sentence.","action":"applied","change":"odrl:duty [ a odrl:Duty ;\n        odrl:action cc:Notice ] ;   # added to the cc:DerivativeWorks and odrl:distribute permissions"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"cc:ShareAlike is modelled as an odrl:Prohibition. Nothing in the text forbids the licensee from placing an adaptation under a share-alike licence; the opposite is true, the licence states that its terms are compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 and with the Open Data Commons Attribution License. In ODRL a prohibition says the licensee must not do the act, so this statement asserts something the licence does not say, and it changes every compatibility answer against a share-alike licence. The family-rule baseline raises the same point for permissive software licences under rule 5b. Proposed for removal, together with the two sibling records that carry the identical block.","action":"superseded","superseded_by":2,"change":"remove:\n    odrl:prohibition [ a odrl:Prohibition ;\n            odrl:action cc:ShareAlike ]"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"minor","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"dalicc:addStatement is modelled as an odrl:Prohibition, which the vocabulary reads as: the licensee must pass the licence on unchanged and may not attach additional terms or notices. The licence says the opposite in its permission list, the information may be combined with other information or included in the licensee's own product or application, and it imposes no pass-through condition at all. Proposed for removal.","action":"superseded","superseded_by":2,"change":"remove:\n    odrl:prohibition [ a odrl:Prohibition ;\n            odrl:action dalicc:addStatement ]"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"info","field":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer","description":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer holds both paragraphs of the No warranty section, quoted verbatim, including the liability sentence. The record has no separate dalicc:LiabilityLimitation, which is the convention of all four National Archives records in this review group and is left alone. The Exemptions section, personal data, unpublished information, logos and crests, military insignia, third-party rights, patents, trade marks and design rights, identity documents, is not carried anywhere in the record.","action":"none"},{"rubric":7,"severity":"info","field":"cc:jurisdiction","description":"dalicc:worldwide and dalicc:perpetual match the grant, \"a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive licence\". The governing law is the jurisdiction of the Information Provider's principal place of business, which the model has no field for: cc:jurisdiction records the territorial scope of the grant, not the governing law.","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"record","description":"Three clauses have no vocabulary term. The exemptions list, which carves personal data, unpublished information, insignia and third-party rights out of the grant; the automatic end of the rights on breach; and the statement of compatibility with CC-BY-4.0 and ODC-By-1.0, which is exactly the kind of fact the compatibility checker should know. Proposed terms: dalicc:exemptedMaterial, dalicc:terminationOnBreach, dalicc:compatibleWith.","action":"none"},{"rubric":9,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The consistency check reports no conflict, before and after the corrections.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The National Archives records in this review group, OGL 3.0, NCGL 2.0, the Open Supreme Court Licence and the Developer Licence, share one drafting pattern but were not modelled alike: OGL 3.0 and the Supreme Court licence carried the share-alike and add-statement prohibitions and no notice duty, while NCGL 2.0 carried the notice duty and neither prohibition. After the review the notice duty and the modified-works permission are uniform; the two unsupported prohibitions are proposed for removal in both records. the review of duplicates (see the review method, docs/LICENSE_REVIEW.md section 3) flagged that this record, the Supreme Court licence and the Canadian Open Government Licence had one identical deontic signature; they still do, and for OGL 3.0 against the Canadian licence that is close to correct, since the two texts say almost the same thing.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"major","field":"record","description":"Standard-license addition of 2026-09-15, decision 9: the record was corrected against its new siblings and versioned. The review's finding on family consistency: the record prohibited cc:ShareAlike and dalicc:addStatement although the licence prescribes an attribution statement and says nothing about share-alike, and it did not state the database right although the licence covers 'copyright and database right material'.","action":"applied"}],"family":"Government licenses (United Kingdom, Canada)","port_of":null,"variant_kind":null,"notes":"The licence is the base document of the UK Government Licensing Framework and the parent of the two other National Archives records reviewed here. Nothing in this review is legal advice."}