The BBC has been given free access to data from third parties for use by its BBC Backstage developers network.

The Press Association (PA) has opened up the API and data from its event listings information for no charge, Ian Forrester, senior producer for BBC Backstage, told an industry conference.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk, Forrester said PA had opened up its data to BBC Backstage, because they did not have a place to showcase the information themselves.

“They have this huge events database. They know they could sell certain parts of it but only a certain amount. The admin of trying to sell that stuff is too great, they may as well give it away for free, but they are also interested in seeing the creative use of this data,” Forrester explained to delegates at the Media Futures Conference.

Several data streams from within the corporation will also be made available to the network in the next few months, Forrester added.

Data from the BBC iPlayer will be opened up through BBC Backstage, he said, with plans to create personalised search functions and alerts when content is added to the player.

Following the recent addition of full text RSS feeds for the BBC’s blogs, Forrester told Journalism.co.uk that full text feeds for the BBC’s news content would be ‘a natural progression for newsgathering’.