The Status of Open Data in the Statute Law of the Republic of Türkiye and the Islamic Republic of Iran

Abstract

Open data are data produced or recomended by the government or institutions which are under government control, and can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone. For the purpose of a person to be able to express his thoughts, he must be able to freely expose them to the public. The existence of laws governing access to information (such as: The Access to Information Act, The Data Protection Act and The personal data protection Act) is one of the indicators of readiness for open government.The openness of data is closely related to transparency and accountability, therefore, attention has been paid to this issue in various countries. The subject of this article is to investigate the legal status of open data in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Turkey. This essay compares the subject laws of Iran and Turkey in the field of open data and aims to represent the commonalities and differences between the two countries and the possibility of legal convergence of them.The present study, by the descriptive method and the qualitative content analysis of the documents, proposes the hypothesis that both countries have recognized the right to access information with limitations. Finally, the main proposition is that in the studied countries, since the law of freedom of information has not been able to meet the explicit requirements of the government, therefore, there is no deep and accurate understanding of the concept of open data.

Keywords

• open data
• right to information
• right to access
• transparency