Article 32t

(1) Member States shall support the availability of research data, as well as scientific publications, 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.

Justification

The principle of open access to publicly funded research data is qualified by the principle of ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’, which already requires that security, intellectual property and legitimate commercial interests be taken into account. In order to give effect to that qualification, and without prejudice to the European Research Area, a Member State should be able to restrict the dissemination or re-use of certain research data where the applicable framework does not adequately protect against the unauthorised transfer of knowledge, the infringement of intellectual property rights, or the exposure of the data to the extraterritorial reach of a third-country law liable to harm the security or economic security of the Union or of a Member State. Confined to what is necessary and proportionate, this possibility reinforces the protection of strategic knowledge and of intellectual property without calling into question the openness of European research.

(2) Without prejudice to Article 32n, paragraph 3, point (d), research data, as well as scientific publications, shall be re-usable for commercial or non-commercial purposes in accordance with Section 1 and Section 2 Subsection 3, 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.