The ePSIplatform follows legal cases and complaint procedures on PSI re-use, and publishes reviews of decisions and their impact.
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This Coal Authority case clarifies re-use concept and importance of sound re-use procedures within public sector bodies.

Short impact analysis
One of the UK Coal Authority’s public tasks is the collection of information on coal mining activities, and the creation of standardized reports on those activities, which are available for re-use. PinPoint Ltd. however wanted the right to re-use the databases that the Coal Authority held to produce these reports. Upon refusal of this request, PinPoint filed a complaint with the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI). OPSI ruled that the UK’s PSI Regulations formally did not apply to PinPoint’s request, as it failed to state a clear re-use. PinPoint had only specified an intention to produce its own reports, similar to the ones the Coal Authority was producing. This was not a form of re-use, according to OPSI, but rather a replication of the Coal Authority’s public tasks. The case highlights the importance for aspiring re-users to specify in their requests how exactly they intend to re-use PSI, including by describing how the use goes beyond the public tasks already performed by the public sector body (PSB). OPSI also found that the Coal Authority’s treatment of the request violated several principles of the Information Fair Trader Scheme (IFTS), which determines how PSBs should process re-use requests. OPSI made several recommendations to improve the Coal Authority’s practices.

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