Australian School Ranking began advertising its 854-page report this week on its website for $97 a copy. The report contains lists of the country's top primary and secondary schools, based on averages of National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy test scores, as well as highest and lowest attendance rates, teacher-student ratios and rankings of best and worst performing schools in each of the years 3, 5, 7 and 9. The report also includes contact details for every school in the country that takes part in NAPLAN testing.

The authority's board chairman, Barry McGaw, confirmed that copyright was one of the areas his organisation was concerned about. ''It is an unintelligent and unhelpful use of our data and anyone who paid to get it rather than look at our website would be wasting their money,'' Professor McGaw said.

Australian School Ranking spokesman Stephen James said yesterday that if government and authorities did not want the data used, they shouldn't have put it on the internet. ''If you look at the report you'll see the extensive amount of work, day and night, that we have put into this report, generating the statistics, in terms of ordering and generating this, the data was only a very small part of this,'' Mr James said. ''What we've done is present the information that is more legible to people.'' While declining to say how many copies have been sold, Mr James said interest had been strong, including from buyers within government departments.