Sovereign Data Commons and Public Data Infrastructure
Europe has invested heavily in digitizing cultural heritage, producing research data, and building common data spaces. Yet the long-term infrastructure needed to store, steward, and provide durable access to these publicly funded assets largely does not exist. When project funding ends, data often degrades or becomes inaccessible. Institutions are forced to migrate to commercial platforms under terms that do not serve the public interest. The EU’s Data Union Strategy sets ambitious goals for leveraging public data assets for AI development—but ambition without infrastructure is insufficient.
This policy brief—the third in the Policy Building Blocks for Digital Commons series—identifies this missing infrastructure layer and proposes how to fill it. It is part of Open Future’s work within the NGI Commons project, informing advocacy ahead of the next Multiannual Financial Framework (2028–2034).
The brief proposes the establishment of a dedicated public data storage infrastructure, governed according to commons principles, to serve as the foundational layer for common European data spaces and related initiatives. This infrastructure would fulfil three core functions:
- Long-term storage and preservation: secure, redundant storage for public data assets, with clear preservation commitments and the capacity to maintain accessibility as formats and technologies evolve.
- Access provision: standardized interfaces that enable data spaces, researchers, and other legitimate users to access stored data, supporting both individual retrieval and bulk access for AI-era use cases.
- Commons-based governance: collective decision-making by contributing institutions, differentiated access conditions for commercial and non-commercial uses, and structural safeguards against capture by private actors.
The proposed infrastructure would adopt a federated architecture, distributed across participating institutions and Member States, building on experience from the European Open Science Cloud while serving a broader mandate that extends to cultural heritage, linguistic resources, and administrative data sets.
The brief makes the case that the forthcoming Cloud and AI Development Act and the Digital Leadership window of the European Competitiveness Fund offer concrete opportunities to embed public data storage within the EU’s digital policy framework—not as a time-limited project, but as durable public infrastructure deserving sustained public investment.
