The Hague Declaration - LIBER Europe

The Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age

The Hague Declaration recognises the huge potential for knowledge discovery in an area of digital information whilst also acknowledging that steps need to be taken to remove obstacles and ensure that everyone can benefit from this potential. The principles outlined in the Declaration are designed to ensure that citizens, researchers, and businesses will all have equal opportunities to access data, and to develop and use digital tools for knowledge discovery.

Supported with funding from the Open Society Foundation, the development of the Hague Declaration was led by LIBER and it was officially published on May 6th, 2015 in Brussels. By 2018, over 900 organisations and people have signed up to support it.

Download the Declaration here:

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About the Hague Declaration

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History of the Declaration

In the current era, we are producing data in far greater quantities than ever before.

Harnessing the data deluge has been recognised as having the potential to help find solutions for some of society’s biggest challenges, such as climate change, health and demographic change, depleting natural resources, and globalisation.

Whilst the benefits of access to data and the use of techniques such as Text and Data Mining (TDM) to analyse data have been widely acknowledged, the reality is that there are major barriers preventing access to and exploitation of data. These issues include a lack of legal certainty, restrictive licences provided by publishers, a skills gap and a lack of infrastructure.

This situation has created a need to foster agreement across disciplines and sectors about the real benefits of TDM. We need a strategy for the way forward in terms of creating the conditions for realising these benefits in a way that ensures a positive societal impact.

For this reason, 25 global experts from many different areas of specialisation — researchers, publishers, lawyers, lecturers — gathered in The Hague on 9-10 December 2014 to write the Hague Declaration. Their belief is that this Declaration will help shape ethical research practice, legislative reform and the development of open access policies and infrastructure. Profiles of each original participant can be found here.