Informing the nation open access to statistical information in Australia

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has a legislative, and a strongly held organisational commitment to the Australian community to publish the results of all statistical collections that it conducts, and make them accessible by all. In 2005, the ABS introduced free statistics on the ABS website. Since then, there has been exponential growth in the on-line access of ABS statistics. Aiming to take advantage of the opportunities available from Web 2.0 technologies, in late 2008, the ABS adopted Attribution 2.5 Australia licence of Creative Commons. This initiative is expected to lead to better decision making through high value-added information products created by re-using, sharing, mixing and matching of ABS data with other data sets.