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Research has surveyed barriers regarding the opening of data. The main barriers are: 1 2 3 4

  • Public data owners lack awareness and knowledge about the benefits of open data, such as increased service quality, increased transparency and trust by citizens, active citizenship through a higher participation in political and public debates, and actual cost savings through the generation of economic activities and better services.

  • Public data owners are concerned about economic issues such as the costs of opening data and the lack of business models, and they are uncertain on the extent and nature of return of investment. They do not see the value of the benefits listed above.

  • The management of heterogeneous conditions of reuse of data is very challenging, and legal issues such as privacy is also a concern. Data is not published if the implications on privacy is unclear.

  • Data owners have responsibility concerns and tend to have risk-averse cultures. They are concerned about what the use of the data may lead to, and thus they think that access to data should be restricted. Data owners also fear that the opening of data will increase the demand for better data quality, more stability in data availability, more user-friendly user interfaces, etc.

References and further reading

  1. Janssen, Marijn, Yannis Charalabidis, and Anneke Zuiderwijk. “Benefits, adoption barriers and myths of open data and open government.” Information systems management 29.4 (2012): 258-268. ↩

  2. Martin, Sébastien, et al. “Open data: Barriers, risks and opportunities.” Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on eGovernment: ECEG. 2013. ↩

  3. Martin,Chris. “Barriers to the Open Government Data Agenda: Taking a Multi‐Level Perspective.” Policy & Internet 6.3 (2014): 217-240. ↩

  4. Toots, Maarja, et al. “Open data as enabler of public service co-creation: exploring the drivers and barriers.” E-Democracy and Open Government (CeDEM), 2017 Conference for. IEEE, 2017. ↩

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