From Open Access January 2025 to Collective Governance: Two Decades of Digital Commons Policies in the European Union

"This report provides a comprehensive—though not exhaustive—overview of policies supporting Digital Commons over the past 20 years. While focusing on the European Union (EU) and its member states, it includes relevant examples from other regions and local levels. Based on desk research, it synthesizes findings from existing reports and mappings on Digital Commons. A key contribution of this report is its integration of different resources under the holistic framework of Digital Commons, while most sources have focused on individual subsets of Digital Commons, such as open source software or open data.

The concept of Digital Commons encompasses a diverse range of systems and solutions that are collaboratively owned, developed, and maintained by communities rather than single entities. These commons operate on principles of peer collaboration rather than hierarchical control or market pricing. Initially emerging from grassroots efforts, many Digital Commons—such as Wikipedia and Apache—have millions of daily users. Today, open source software (OSS) constitutes 76% of all software code, growing to form the backbone of global digital infrastructures. Studies have estimated that OSS contributes €65–€95 billion to the EU’s GDP, comparable to the air and water transport sectors combined. Globally, OSS’s market value is estimated at $8.8 trillion. Beyond software, Wikimedia Commons' images alone have been valued at $28.9 billion. These studies show the performance of Digital Commons as a mode of production. They have formed a stack of technologies that has become increasingly complex and intertwined, a stack on which everybody, from major tech companies, to governments, global industries and societies are dependent on.

At the start of the 21st century, Europe adopted policies centered on open access, promoting the free circulation of knowledge, software and data. Milestones like the 2003 Directive on Public Sector Information reuse and the European Commission's 2012 recommendation for open access to publicly funded research laid the groundwork for embedding openness into digital policy frameworks. Publicly funded resources, including outputs of research were increasingly made available proactively, based on "open by default" policies. Additionally, incentives for the circulation and reuse of data outside of the public sector were established, for instance for highly valuable datasets. These efforts emphasized the economic benefits of making information and knowledge accessible and aimed to support transparency and citizen empowerment. Additionally, the EU has become a pioneer in the adoption of OSS for the modernization of its administrations: 14 countries in the EU have adopted legally binding documents to support public sector adoption of OSS tools. Beyond regulatory measures, governments have created procurement guidelines, collaborated on catalogues of OSS solutions, created networks of practices, or more recently, established Open Source Programme Offices (OSPOs), facilitating the implementation of OSS solutions to avoid vendor lock-ins and for increased transparency, interoperability, and cost-efficiency...."