WIREDGOV

The National Archives oversees the UK Government Licensing Framework, helping both public sector information providers and people who re-use this data to understand their rights and responsibilities. We need both groups to participate in user research to make sure we are meeting your needs.

Cross-government policy ambitions

Information and data are more important to Britain, its economy, and its society, than ever. His Majesty’s Government recognises this. High-quality data, the AI Opportunities Action (2025) says, is the ‘lifeblood of modern AI’ (Artificial Intelligence).

The UK has a world-leading information and data economy, Britain’s Modern Industrial Strategy (2025) notes, but it still has more to do. If government does not seek to better understand curate, enhance, and disseminate public and private sector data and information – it if it does not treat it as a modern economic, financial, and social asset and unlock its value across the economy – we risk falling behind internationally rather than reaping the benefits.

The Open Government Licence

The Open Government Licence (OGL) was first launched in 2010, and remains the way that the UK Government (and the public sector more widely) makes most of its publications, information and data available for re-use under the simplest, most friction-free conditions.

The Open Government Licence symbol.

We know that open government and open data facilitate innovation, business, and economic growth, as well as civil society, transparency, accountability and public trust. The OGL was a key point in the long trajectory of the liberalisation of government information, first proposed in the 1999 Future Management of Crown Copyright white paper, and furthered by the 2000 Cross-cutting Review of the Knowledge Economy’s instruction for Government to ‘raise its game’.

Challenges with digital information and data

Simultaneously to the public and policy conversation about the importance of re-usable information and data to AI and other contemporary technologies, there is the question of whether the owners and authors of digital information and data are receiving a just and sustainable return in the age of algorithmic reproduction, and if not, how they might.

The OGL is closely aligned to Creative Commons CC-BY licence, a centrepiece of the open knowledge and culture movement. However, in June 2025 Creative Commons launched CC Signals, a proposal for a different model ‘as to how machines (and the humans controlling them) should contribute back to the commons when they reuse and benefit from using the content’. The proposal noted that AI’s usage of data has fundamentally changed the web, and the ‘social contract’ that underpinned machine use of it.

The public sector is, in many ways, no different. Digital information and data are unusual goods, in that they cost a lot to create, but carry the expectation that they will be made available for re-use for little (or nothing) given the marginal costs of their dissemination. But whereas private and commercial creators and rightsholders can withdraw their content from the web, or restrict its usage via technological and legal means, the public sector is obligated to make much of its information and data available to the public who paid for it via taxation in the first place, and benefits from information about public sector activities and policies being disseminated and re-used widely.

Re-users' needs and methods are changing, too. Access to information and data is no longer necessarily facilitated by a human ‘clicking’ a mouse – Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Model Context Protocols (MCPs), and AIs (prompt-based or agentic) are a key part of modern re-use. We need to know that the framework and its guidance provide re-users with simplicity and clarity when their data acquisition is automated.

A visitor to The National Archives browses our online historical articles.

We want your thoughts

In the context of these challenges, and the ambitions set out in the Action Plan, Industrial Strategy and other government policy documents, The National Archives is working with Projects by If to carry out user research on the UK Government Licensing Framework (UKGLF), the presentation of the OGL and other licences within it, and the supporting guidance pages and documents.

We want to know, for both information and data providers within the public sector, and re-users (of any scale) of the same, whether the UKGLF webpages fulfil their missions:

• To make the rights and obligations of providers and re-users clear.
• To situate the licences in the context of wider legislation and policy.
• To provide potential licensors with a suite of licences which meet common use cases, so as to minimise licence proliferation, and thereby reduce complexity.

If you think you fit the bill of a provider or re-user, and care about the greatest and most beneficial use of public sector information, then you can help us by participating in the user research we’re conducting with Projects by If.

We want to hear all about people’s experience of government licensing (good and bad!).

Take our short survey about the UKGLF webpages (which takes around 5 minutes to complete).

Participants can optionally express an interest in being selected for a for a paid interview. This lasts 45 to 60 minutes, for which we will give you a £50 voucher. We will contact selected participants directly.