The Ministry of Culture announces its decision in favour of the principle of free access to all rights of reuse of public information contained in documents produced or received by the National Archives.

In line with the law for a Digital Republic, the Ministry of Culture is committed to a policy of openness and sharing of public data, in particular to allow citizens to participate in improving the quality of data.

For example, the National Archives, in close liaison with the interdepartmental service of the Archives de France, have just published a new regime for the reuse of the public information they keep, whether it be inventories or archives. These are documents that are freely available to all and on which third parties do not hold intellectual property rights.

The reader thus has a non-exclusive right to freely “reuse” for commercial or non-commercial purposes, worldwide and for an unlimited period. It is sufficient that this information can be freely communicated within the meaning of article L.213-1 of the French Heritage Code and that it has not been communicated by authorisation or by derogation.

It is also in this context that the Archives de France and the National Archives have published several freely reusable corpus on the Ministry’s open data platform: data.culturecommunication.gouv.fr