Data are essential for modern public governance, playing a key role in improving internal operations, enhancing services and supporting effective policy making, including through Artificial Intelligence. By providing open data, governments enable everyone – businesses, researchers and citizens – to access, use and share these resources freely to drive innovation, improve transparency and solve societal challenges. The Open, Useful and Re-usable Data (OURdata) Index measures how well governments design open data policies, involve stakeholders in defining these policies and publish high-value datasets.
The 2023 OURdata Index highlights varying levels of open data maturity among OECD countries. The average composite score for OECD countries is 0.48 out of 1. Korea is the country with the highest score (0.91), followed by France (0.83) and Poland (0.79). Of the three pillars that comprise the index, data accessibility scores the highest on average (0.59), indicating that OECD countries are generally effective in making their data easily accessible and reusable. Data availability follows, with an average score of 0.48, suggesting room for improvement in designing open data policies and publishing high-value datasets. Government support for data re-use has the lowest average score (0.37), highlighting a need for increased efforts in encouraging data re-use across society (Figure 7.7).
The data availability pillar measures how well governments design and steer open data policies and ensure that high-value data is published. France (0.89 out of 1) leads in this category, closely followed by Korea with 0.84. Both countries have strong strategies, including clear governance structures, guidelines and requirements for open data publication. Denmark (0.73), Estonia (0.72), and Lithuania (0.71) are the next highest scorers (Figure 7.8).
The data accessibility pillar evaluates how easily accessible and re-usable open government data are, as well as the functions and performance of the national open government data portal. Poland earns the highest score for this measure with 0.96 and Korea (0.90) and Norway (0.89) follow close behind (Figure 7.9).
The pillar on government support for data re-use focuses on how governments encourage the re-use of open data across society. Korea stands out with a score of 1.00, reflecting its advanced programmes for fostering data re-use. Spain (0.85), along with Poland, Ireland and France (all scoring 0.75) also show advanced practices in this area (Online Figure J.4.2).
The results from the 2023 OURdata Index demonstrate the need for governments to expand open data efforts, shifting from seeing data as a public right to recognising it as a strategic asset for innovation, transparency and economic growth. This transition requires balancing openness with strong privacy and security protections, especially as some OECD countries face growing security concerns in today’s geopolitical context. By aligning data policies with evolving digital needs, governments can unlock the potential of their data while ensuring responsible governance and trust.
