A collection of FAIR Dutch Freedom of Information Act documents

Ruben van Heusden, Maik Larooij, Jaap Kamps, Maarten Marx

Abstract: When Dutch citizens want to gain insights into the decision-making process of their government, they can file a so-called Freedom of Information Act request, requesting information on specific topics. The resulting documents (released publicly) have the potential to be a valuable resource for the research community, both in the domain of computer science, as well as the social- and political sciences. However, the current publication landscape is very scattered, with many organizations publishing on their own websites, with little to no coordination on document structure, (meta)data quality, and without a standardized metadata format. In this paper we present a collection of these documents published as FAIR data. The dataset contains just over two million pages, collected by scraping supplier websites, after which document metadata standardization was performed, and checks were carried out to ensure text- and metadata quality. The document text- and layout, their metadata, and where available links to the original PDF files, are all available through the DANS data repository, including usage instructions and examples.

External IDs:doi:10.1038/s41597-025-05052-2