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Chapter III – Conditions for re-use (Art. 5-10)

Art. 5 Open Data Directive - Available formats arrow_right_alt

Art. 6 Open Data Directive - Principles governing charging arrow_right_alt

Art. 7 Open Data Directive - Transparency arrow_right_alt

Art. 8 Open Data Directive - Standard licences arrow_right_alt

Art. 9 Open Data Directive - Practical arrangements arrow_right_alt

Art. 10 Open Data Directive - Research data arrow_right_alt

  1. Member States shall support the availability of research data by adopting national policies and relevant actions aiming at making publicly funded research data openly available (‘open access policies’), following the principle of ‘open by default’ and compatible with the FAIR principles. In that context, concerns relating to intellectual property rights, personal data protection and confidentiality, security and legitimate commercial interests, shall be taken into account in accordance with the principle of ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’. Those open access policies shall be addressed to research performing organisations and research funding organisations.
  2. Without prejudice to point (c) of Article 1(2), research data shall be re-usable for commercial or non-commercial purposes in accordance with Chapters III and IV, insofar as they are publicly funded and researchers, research performing organisations or research funding organisations have already made them publicly available through an institutional or subject-based repository. In that context, legitimate commercial interests, knowledge transfer activities and pre-existing intellectual property rights shall be taken into account.
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Recital 27

The volume of research data generated is growing exponentially and has potential for re-use beyond the scientific community. In order to be able to address mounting societal challenges efficiently and in a holistic manner, it has become crucial and urgent to be able to access, blend and re-use data from different sources, as well as across sectors and disciplines. Research data includes statistics, results of experiments, measurements, observations resulting from fieldwork, survey results, interview recordings and images. It also includes meta-data, specifications and other digital objects. Research data is different from scientific articles reporting and commenting on findings resulting from their scientific research. For many years, the open availability and re-usability of scientific research data stemming from public funding has been subject to specific policy initiatives. Open access is understood as the practice of providing online access to research outputs free of charge for the end user and without restrictions on use and re-use beyond the possibility to require acknowledgement of authorship. Open access policies aim in particular to provide researchers and the public at large with access to research data as early as possible in the dissemination process and to facilitate its use and re-use. Open access helps enhance quality, reduce the need for unnecessary duplication of research, speed up scientific progress, combat scientific fraud, and it can overall favour economic growth and innovation. Beside open access, commendable efforts are being made to ensure that data management planning becomes a standard scientific practice and to support the dissemination of research data that are findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable (the FAIR principle).

Recital 28

For the reasons explained above, it is appropriate to set an obligation on Member States to adopt open access policies with respect to publicly funded research data and ensure that such policies are implemented by all research performing organisations and research funding organisations. Research performing organisations and research funding organisations could also be organised as public sector bodies or public undertakings. This Directive applies to such hybrid organisations only in their capacity as research performing organisations and to their research data. Open access policies typically allow for a range of exceptions from making scientific research results openly available. The Commission Recommendation of 25 April 2018 on access to and preservation of scientific information describes, among other things, relevant elements of open access policies. Additionally, the conditions, under which certain research data can be re-used, should be improved. For that reason, certain obligations stemming from this Directive should be extended to research data resulting from scientific research activities subsidised by public funding or co-funded by public and private-sector entities. Under the national open access policies, publicly funded research data should be made open as the default option. However, in this context, concerns in relation to privacy, protection of personal data, confidentiality, national security, legitimate commercial interests, such as trade secrets, and to intellectual property rights of third parties should be duly taken into account, according to the principle ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’. Moreover, research data which are excluded from access on grounds of national security, defence or public security should not be covered by this Directive. In order to avoid any administrative burden, obligations stemming from this Directive should apply only to such research data that have already been made publicly available by researchers, research performing organisations or research funding organisations through an institutional or subject-based repository and should not impose extra costs for the retrieval of the datasets or require additional curation of data. Member States may extend the application of this Directive to research data made publicly available through other data infrastructures than repositories, through open access publications, as an attached file to an article, a data paper or a paper in a data journal. Documents other than research data should continue to be exempt from the scope of this Directive.

Recital 61

This Directive is without prejudice to Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council (1). It provides for conditions within which public sector bodies can exercise their intellectual property rights in the internal information market when allowing re-use of documents. Where public sector bodies are holders of the right provided for in Article 7(1) of Directive 96/9/EC, they should not exercise that right in order to prevent re-use or to restrict the re-use of existing documents beyond the limits provided for in this Directive.


(1) Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society (OJ L 167, 22.6.2001, p. 10).