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United Kingdom (UK) followed with their own plans to open
public data, with the Prime Minister announcing the setting up
of the data.gov.uk website. Subsequently, the European
Commission published a Communication on Open Data in
2011, and in the same year, US, UK, and initially six other
countries were signatories to the Open Government
Declaration. UK is considered as one of the leading countries
in Europe for open data. The data.gov.uk website is one of the
most comprehensive open data repositories making available
non-personal UK government data about public services, ranging from health, social services, education, transport to crime
and other geo-environmental data.
Although countries such as the UK and US have taken
proactive steps to improve the availability and ease of use of
data (through machine-readability and technical standards),
there still remain several barriers orientated around human,
organisational and technological factors to accessibility and
usability of open data that prevent its widespread proliferation.
Moreover, the actual structuring and interrogation of open
data is cumbersome and often requires detailed analytical
skills. To fully exploit the potential of open data, users will
usually require a certain level of technical skills. The fact that
there is no existing easy-to-use, proven solution, which can
help citizens exploit open data for decision making (affecting
day-to-day activities), or contribute to the wider public policy
making debate, does not promote the widespread take-up of
open data sources. Such issues are further compounded by the
generic nature of open data repositories such as www.data.
gov.uk and www.epsiplatform.eu, and thus their relevance
and direct interest to citizens, in particular.
The motivation for this paper lies in the reasoning that although the availability of open data offers many opportunities
for citizens, no research exists that questions the usability of
open data platforms, particularly from a citizen’s perspective.
As a result, this research contributes to the public sector and
open data literature by proposing an adjusted diffusion of innovation model based on Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory
(DOI) to empirically determine the predictors influencing the
use of public sector open data. The paper is structured as follows: next section of the paper reviews the literature offering an
overview of open data. The following section presents a discussion surrounding the development of the research model
and the hypotheses that have been proposed as part of this
study. The research method is then explained in the subsequent
section, followed by the analysis of empirical data and discussion of the findings. The paper concludes by outlining the main
contributions and acknowledging the limitations of this study.

2 Literature context: an overview of open data
The goal of Open Data initiatives has been to open all nonpersonal and non-commercial data, especially data collected

and processed by government organizations (Braunschweig
et al. 2012). Public sector organisations have started making
governmental data available on web portals, as web services,
so that the public have access to such official datasets in one
place. The increase in availability of open data initiatives has
been seen mainly due to the growing pressure imposed by
governments on all kinds of public organisations to release
their raw data (Sivarajah et al. 2016; Janssen et al. 2012).
The key motivators encouraging public organisations to publish data revolves around government’s perception that the
open access to publicly-funded data provides: (a) greater economic returns from public investment (Cranefield et al. 2014),
(b) access to policy-makers with data needed to address complex problems (Sivarajah et al. 2016; Arzberger et al. 2004),
(c) generates wealth through the downstream use of outputs
(Janssen et al. 2012), and (d) helps involve citizens in
analysing large quantities of datasets (Surowiecki 2004).
Using open data can provide several advantages to civil
servants, citizens and other stakeholders, such as increased
transparency and accountability (Rose et al. 2015; Cranefield
et al. 2014; Bertot et al. 2010), stimulating innovation (van
Veenstra and van den Broek 2013; Janssen et al. 2012), and
increased participation of citizens in government activities
(Castellanos et al. 2013; Conradie and Choenni 2014;
McDermott 2010). One of the most notable advantage of open
data is that making government data transparent increases public trust in government and civil servants, and also allows citizens to hold the government officials accountable (Cranefield
et al., 2014; Ubaldi, 2013; Janssen et al., 2012). Scholars such
as Borzacchiello and Craglia (2012) and Janssen et al. (2012)
have asserted, open data can have a positive impact on economic growth by, for example, encouraging the marketplace to
develop products and services, which increases productivity,
offering employment, and bringing revenue back to
government in the form of taxation revenue. Apart from
economic benefits, Ubaldi (2013) highlights, open data also
has societal benefits as it allows citizens to interact with government in an informed and interactive manner. According to
Cranefield et al. (2014), opening data can also lead to improved
data quality via crowdsourcing of corrections or by filling gaps
in data.
Although open data can potentially provide considerable
benefits, its use also comes with a number of drawbacks.
Some of the key challenges are - increasing public interest,
cost involved in opening up data, data ownership risk, legality
and privacy issues (Weerakkody et al. 2015; Dwivedi et al.
2015; Osman et al. 2014). Scholars such as Ubaldi (2013) and
Zuiderwijk et al. (2012) assert that one of the most significant
challenge is stimulating public interest in using open data
effectively. Then, there is the cost of opening up of data
(Cranefield et al. 2014 and Ubaldi 2013), especially as they
are often experienced as upfront costs thus calling for the need
for robust approached to evaluation (Sharif et al. 2010; Irani

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