Information generated and collected by public sector entities represents a veritable minefield; it might make a much greater contribution to EU economies and societies, if current legal barriers to access and re-user were removed. The LAPSI project will deal both with established PSI areas (geographic, land register data, etc.) as well as novel areas (cultural data from archives, libraries, scientific information, etc.) and environmental figures and data sets. Legal barriers to access and re-use and strategies to overcome them shall be considered from the perspectives of information, IP, privacy and competition law; in addition it will deal with administrative, environmental law and public procurement rules. The proposal brings together partners belonging to research institutions which have made substantial contributions in the relevant fields, as well as a number of crucial stakeholders, from a large number of EU jurisdictions. The debate is to be organized around four focal points: (1)implementation and deployment issues; (2)design of the incentives for public bodies and private players, both in the for-profit and non-profit sectors, to make available and, respectively, to re-use public data; (3)special consideration of infra- and supra-national levels of access and re-use policies and practices, intended to enlist the dynamic forces of regulatory competition and to bring out the full potential of cross-border, EU-wide services; and (4)strategic vision and occasions for out-of-the box thinking for the next steps ahead in policy making.The discussion will be organized around cycles of seminars and conferences, intended to foster debate among the researches and players in the field, which will be complemented by dissemination exercises linked to it (primers) and awareness-raising events and contests. The network activity is to produce a set of policy guidelines that will help all interested stakeholders in their access and reuse policies and practices.