Liberating public goods from the NTIS - radical

The National Technical Information Service charges absurd amounts for data that's part of the public domain, including various data sets used in healthcare. A small company has noticed that there's an opportunity here ...

Marginal Revolution: The private provision of public goods

...Public.Resource.Org takes non-copyrighted documents that the federal government charges the public for and puts them into the public domain. Not much is available now but the service wants to make available for free all of the millions of documents, videos and other material from National Technical Information Service. To build their library Public.Resource.Org are asking people who want a government document to buy it through their service. They will then make the document available to everyone else for free....

Currently the web site lists dozens of $100 healthcare videos that nobody with free will would be interested in. They don't list code sets yet, it may be the ones I'm thinking of are not truly owned by the feds ...