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The article reviews the debates and policies on access to publicsector information (PSI) in Europe in relation to the contests between policies of open access, rights of access to PSI by citizens and business, and the assessment of the cost benefits of PSI to the economy and society. The political dimension of these debates within the European Union is highlighted to demonstrate the complexities of the governance of information within a pan-European regulatory framework.This article focuses on the debates surrounding access to public-sector information (PSI) in the European Union (EU; currently 25 Member States), in particular as they relate to EU policies articulated by the European Commission (EC). We review the contest that exists between the "rights" of citizens to consume PSI, the "obligations" of PSI producers to "liberate" information, and the turbulences of globalized information spaces that complicate the task of matching these rights and obligations through the manifold distributional channels that exist today.There is a range of explanatory perspectives that could be adopted for this analysis. We could consider organizational theory, whereby the PSI owners (usually government agencies) remain obdurately structuralist organiza-

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