StergiosAidinlis, Big Data for the Public Good: Regulating Access to Public Sector Big Data for Research and Innovation, New York, NY and Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2025, 240pp, hb, £90.00.

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

Different actors -governments, international organisations, the private sector, NGOs and researchers -increasingly view the quantity and quality of data generated and held by the public sector as a key input into research and innovation, especially in this Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) age.The European Union (EU) acknowledges this with its sectoral data spaces initiative under the Data Governance Act, which seeks to pool data from various bodies and sources, including both the public and private sectors, to facilitate research and innovation in the bloc.Notwithstanding Brexit, the UK government has indicated similar intentions through the proposed National Data Library, which seeks to provide a 'one-stop-shop' catalogue of public sector datasets in the UK.In the UK, this occurs against a legal backdrop including: the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Data Protection Act 2018 governing personal data; the Digital Economy Act 2017 (DEA -especially section 64 and the Code under section 70 which allow data held by public authorities in connection with their functions to be disclosed for research purposes, if in the public interest); the NHS Act 2006 and the Health and Social Care Act 2012 (which set out the powers of data custodians to make health data accessible for research in England); and the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 (whose section 67(1)(b) aims to facilitate more research with personal data by clarifying 'scientific research' in Article 4 of the UK GDPR to comprise that which is publicly or privately funded, and commercial or non-commercial activities).Together, these frameworks govern and aim to facilitate greater, data protection-compliant, access to government or administrative data for research and innovation purposes.Despite its political and economic importance, the governance of public sector data, who can access it, and on what basis has received scant attention from legal scholars.Stergios Aidinlis' masterful book remedies this lacuna, with its focus on data provided or collected by UK public bodies in the pursuance of their duties, and its onwards accessibility to third parties for research and innovation purposes.Defining public sector data is challenging, especially, as Aidinlis acknowledges, given the public-private divide is not clear-cut, with the privatisation of public services over the last decades in the UK and phenomena such as contracting out and public-private partnerships (PPPs).Thus, he adopts a focus on the purpose of the data being for the