The thematic network “Legal aspects of public sector information 2.0” brings together academic experts on legal issues of PSI with stakeholders from the public and private sector in order to identify the legal barriers to the re-use market and the opening up of government data.
The network will work around five main aspects that are currently leading to new paradigms and discourses in the PSI market: 1) reconciling PSI and open data. While the re-use of PSI has been on the European Commission’s agenda for a long time, open data has started as a grassroots movement with a different background. Reconciling both leads to new challenges that need to be identified and addressed; 2) from one approach for all to a multi-faceted approach: with the proposal to include new institutions in the scope of the PSI directive, the question can be raised whether soft-law sector approaches need to be developed that can take the differences between different types of data into account; 3) legal interoperability: while many efforts are taking place to create licensing models, the cross-border use of PSI is still hindered by the lack of interoperability of these licences. Proposals need to be made to solve this; 4) from data to services: related to the previous aspect, the PSI market can no longer be seen as a purely data-driven market. It consists of many different segments between data dumps on website and SLA-driven real-time download services. This creates many new questions. 5) from single-direction data delivery to participatory data exchange: PSI is increasingly being combined with other types of data, including user-generated content. Legal issues regarding the combination of these different types of data need to be addressed.
The network will address these aspects by organising workshops and conferences, by creating position papers that raise awareness and that influence policy, and by developing a PSI handbook that can guide users in sharing and using PSI.

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