The final version of the EC's proposal for a Data Act was released on February 23, 2022. Public consultation is ongoing

The Act is an initiative aimed at building a data-driven economy and society, at creating a single market and the free flow of information. It defines the processes and structures of data sharing by enterprises, individuals and the public sector. It specifies who can use what data and for what purposes.

The provisions of the Act include following issues:

• interoperability standards for data to be reused between sectors,
• enabling public sector bodies to access and use private sector data,
• protect SMEs against unfair contract terms imposed by a party with greater negotiating power,
• facilitate switching between cloud and edge services,
• put in place safeguards against unlawful data transfer without notification by cloud service providers.

The proposal for the Data Act is of concern to The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities. In it’s statement we read that current draft "does not provide the sufficient means to ensure a fair access to privately held data for research purposes". Although there are related provisions in the document (Chapter 3, Art. 8), they refer to the business-to-business relationship. The Guild recommends extending the scope of these provisions to include business-to-government sharing and data sharing for research purposes. The current provisions relating to this relationship speak of making data available to the public sector only in situations of "exceptional need" and link it with the "state of emergency" and "public interest".

The High-Level Expert Group report from 2021 lists 5 circumstances in which data may serve the public interest:

(1) improving our awareness of phenomena,

(2) helping better understand phenomena,

(3) supporting predictions and forecasts,

(4) providing evidence for impacts assessments and evaluations,

(5) guiding public management decisions.increasing awareness of certain phenomena.
 

The Guild highlights that these five activities correspond to research activities. The nature of challenge- and mission-oriented research to address public emergencies, either to prevent or to solve them, and that this type of research extensively relies on fundamental research. It is need to recognise that research is an activity conducted in the public interest and that research is crucial to "respond to a public emergency", "prevent a public emergency", and "assist the recovery from a public emergency". This implies that universities and research-performing organisations - when they are public - must be able to request directly data holders for access to their data. It is crucial that public universities and research-performing organisations do not need to systematically rely on other public sector bodies as intermediate (Article 21 of Act), and, that the requirements for data requests could be reasonably filled by them (Article 17).

Full text of The Guild's statement