Introduction

Digital rights are perhaps more prominent than ever before; for instance the data protection rights afforded by European data protection legislation are increasingly available to citizens across the world as new jurisdictions introduce similar laws or ‘the Brussels Effect’ affects company behaviour (Mahieu et al., 2021). But are these rights accessible, effective, and sufficient? The continued development of new technologies including large language models, may exacerbate, and introduce new threats to digital rights. For example, the unprecedented scale of data collected to train algorithms can create transparency deficits that can limit the monitoring and enforcement of digital rights (Binns & Edwards 2025), while the use of predictive analytics to generate verisimilar personal data can result in digital redlining. 

This special issue asks: 
• What can we learn from the effectiveness of digital rights? 
• Do we need an expanded definition of these rights? 
• What steps should be taken to ensure that digital rights are understood, accessed, and protected, and that this continues in concert with the growth of data-driven systems?

Data and policy are closely intertwined in the study of digital rights; data gathered through rights can inform policy, and at the same time policies about rights can affect the collection and processing of data. Reflecting this relationship, this special issue of the open-access journal Data & Policy aims to expand our understanding of digital rights, including but not limited to data protection rights such as the right to access or erasure, information rights such as freedom of information, or rights conceived of as human/machine rights. Empirical studies that employ rights as a research method are welcomed (Ausloos & Veale, 2021), as is theoretical work that looks at digital rights and policy. We hope to identify current challenges for researchers and policymakers, canvass opportunities for digital rights policy development, and provoke reflection on the potential futures for digital rights. 

Anyone working in the digital rights space is encouraged to submit to this special collection of papers. Note that there are no financial barriers to publishing: Data & Policy can cover the publishing costs of authors who have no access to funding or open access agreements.

References
• Ausloos, J., & Veale, M. (2021). Researching with data rights. Technology and Regulation, 2020, 136–157. https://doi.org/10.26116/TECHR...
• Binns, R., & Edwards, L. (2025). ChatGPT tells fibs about me: Are data protection and libel adequate tools to protect reputation in the LLM era? In P. Hacker, A. Engel, S. Hammer, & B. Mittelstadt (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Foundations and Regulation of Generative AI. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxford...
• Mahieu, R., Asghari, H., Parsons, C., Hoboken, J. van, Crete-Nishihata, M., Hilts, A., & Anstis, S. (2021). Measuring the Brussels Effect through access requests: Has the European General Data Protection Regulation influenced the data protection rights of Canadian citizens? Journal of Information Policy, 11, 301–349. https://doi.org/10.5325/jinfop...

Topics

We welcome papers on any topic relating to digital rights, but are especially interested in papers that concern:
• Reviews of the digital rights landscape
• Educating citizens about their rights
• The ethics of using digital rights in new ways, e.g. teaching or researching with data rights
• Data intermediaries and delegation of rights
• Digital rights and data justice
• Theories of digital rights
• Empirical studies evaluating the effectiveness of digital rights, e.g. the exercising of rights claims, or the utility of the outputs of rights
• Technological threats to rights

Timetable

Deadline for submissions: Friday 30 January 2026.

Articles will be published as soon as possible after acceptance and added to a collection page; earlier submission therefore may result in earlier publication. 

How to Submit

Authors should submit articles through the Data & Policy ScholarOne site, using the special collection tag when prompted.

Please feel free to use the journal's LaTeX or Word templates. Note also that we have a template in Overleaf, a cloud-based, which has collaborative features and enables authors to submit directly into the Data & Policy system without having to re-upload files.

Note that Data & Policy publishes the following types of articles, which authors will be prompted to select from on submission:

• Research articles that use rigorous methods that demonstrate how data science can inform or impact policy by, for example, improving situation analysis, predictions, public service design, and/or the legitimacy and/or effectiveness of policy making. Published research articles are typically reviewed by three peer reviewers: two assessing the academic or methodological rigour of the paper; and one providing an interdisciplinary or policy-specific perspective.
• Commentaries are shorter articles that discuss and/or problematize an issue relevant to the Data & Policy scope. Commentaries are typically reviewed by two peer reviewers.
• Translational papers are contributions that show how data science principles, techniques and technologies are being used in practice in organisational settings to improve policy outcomes. They may present original findings but are less embedded in the scholarly literature as research articles. They are typically reviewed by two peer reviewers, who assess the rigour and policy significance of the paper.
• Data papers that provide a structured description of an openly available dataset with the aim of encouraging its re-use for further research.

You can read more on the Instructions for Authors here

Data & Policy strongly encourages authors to make replication data and code available in an open repository, where this is possible (see the research transparency policy). All authors must provide a Data Availability Statement in their article that explains where the replication material resides, if it is available, and if not, the reason why it cannot be made accessible. Authors who link to replication materials will be awarded Open Data and/or Open Materials badges that display on the published article.

Why Submit to Data & Policy?

✔ A venue developed for and expanding the community working at the data science for governance interface, established by the Data for Policy Conference.
✔ Welcomes research, translational articles, commentaries and data papers, plus the Data & Policy blog for more immediate reflections.
✔ Well-cited (2024 Impact Factor: 2.7 and Cite Score: 3.6) and indexed in Web of Science, Scopus and Directory of Open Access Journals.
✔ Open Access with support for authors who do not have access to funding to pay publishing charges.
✔ Promotes open sharing of data and code through Open Science Badges.

Open Access

Any author can publish on an open access basis in Data & Policy, irrespective of their funding or institutional affiliation. Many articles have publishing costs covered through the Transformative Agreements that Cambridge has set up with universities worldwide. Authors not affiliated with these agreements can still publish open access. Authors who have a grant that specifically budgets for open access publication are expected to pay an article processing charge (APC). However, if an author has no funding to pay an APC and no institutional agreement, the charge will be waived. Please feel free to submit to this special collection irrespective of where you are based and whether or not you have research funding.

Guest editors

• Dennis Bruining, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
• Tristan Henderson, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom
• Suneel Jethani, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
• René Mahieu, Open Universiteit, Netherlands
• Lina Przhedetsky, University of Melbourne, Australia