Malaysia subscribes to the spirit of being transparent, accountable and public engagement in tandem with the definition of Open Government. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) define Open Government as the opening up of government processes, proceedings, documents and data for public scrutiny and involvement.
Although Freedom of Information (FOI) Act is not established yet at the federal level in the country, freedom of information has been practiced through government open data platform (Sarawak Data Portal) such as following:
- Anyone is free to access, use and share.
- Anyone is free to access, use and share at no charge.
- Anyone is free to request new datasets.
- Every dataset is licensed which permit people to use the data in anyway they want including transforming, combining and sharing it with others, even commercially.
- Ensuring information contained in documents is accurate, complete, up-to-date and not misleading.
Creative Common licenses are legal tools that creators and other rights holders can use to offer certain usage rights to the public, while reserving other rights. CC licenses provide an easy way to manage the copyright terms that attach automatically to all creative material under copyright. licenses allow that material to be shared and reused under terms that are flexible and legally sound.
CC licenses are used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use and build upon a work that they have created.In Sarawak Data Portal, CC licenses are used for all data sets to ensure that all the data are ready to used for public.