Open Science and the reuse of publicly funded research data in the new Directive (EU) 2019/1024

Directive 2019/1024/EU aims at establishing a Single Market of publicly funded research data, where the latter become freely available for reuse to any EU stakeholder for commercial and non-commercial purposes. The effectiveness of the harmonised provisions at hand seems to depend on two critical issues, to be tackled by national lawmakers in the current transposition phase ending by July 17, 2021. First, national policies should provide for adequate incentives to the research data publication in open access repositories or journals, since – upon implementation of the Directive – data embedded in closed-access journals could continue to be exposed or not by the publishers as open data, based on their copyright policies. In addition, national lawmakers should reach a fair balance in drafting the exceptions to the “open by default” and reuse obligations for the safeguard in particular of IPRs and trade secrets, in compliance with the principle “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”.