Open data in the United Kingdom

Crown Copyright has been a long-standing copyright protection applied to official works, and at times artistic works, produced under royal or official supervision. In 2006, The Guardian newspaper's Technology section began a "Free Our Data" campaign, calling for data gathered by authorities at public expense to be made freely available for reuse by individuals. In 2010 with the creation of the Open Government Licence and the Data.gov.uk site it appeared that the campaign had been mostly successful, and since 2013 the UK has been consistently named one of the leaders in the open data space.

Despite the UK's leadership position in the open data space, many issues (such as uneven data quality and data literacy) still need to be addressed, but as of 2019 progress has been slow. Some of these issues are addressed in the UK Government's 2017–2020 Government Transformation Strategy.