# The German Commons - 154 Billion Tokens of Openly Licensed Text for German Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13996 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13996/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [The FineWeb Datasets: Decanting the Web for the Finest Text Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17557/) (2024)
- [Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01759/) (2016)
- [Dolma: an Open Corpus of Three Trillion Tokens for Language Model Pretraining Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00159/) (2024)
- [The Stack: 3 TB of permissively licensed source code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15533/) (2022)
- [FastText.zip: Compressing text classification models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03651/) (2016)
- [A Pretrainer's Guide to Training Data: Measuring the Effects of Data Age, Domain Coverage, Quality, & Toxicity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13169/) (2023)
- [RedPajama: an Open Dataset for Training Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12372/) (2024)
- [OpenAlex: A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01833/) (2022)
- [CulturaX: A Cleaned, Enormous, and Multilingual Dataset for Large Language Models in 167 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09400/) (2023)
- [The BigScience ROOTS Corpus: A 1.6TB Composite Multilingual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03915/) (2023)
- [FineWeb2: One Pipeline to Scale Them All -- Adapting Pre-Training Data Processing to Every Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20920/) (2025)
- [olmOCR: Unlocking Trillions of Tokens in PDFs with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18443/) (2025)
- [MultiEURLEX -- A multi-lingual and multi-label legal document classification dataset for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00904/) (2021)
- [The Data Provenance Initiative: A Large Scale Audit of Dataset Licensing & Attribution in AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16787/) (2023)
- [SILO Language Models: Isolating Legal Risk In a Nonparametric Datastore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04430/) (2023)
- [Talkin' 'Bout AI Generation: Copyright and the Generative-AI Supply Chain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08133/) (2023)
- [The Common Pile v0.1: An 8TB Dataset of Public Domain and Openly Licensed Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05209/) (2025)
- [Towards an Open Platform for Legal Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13342/) (2020)
- [MOSEL: 950,000 Hours of Speech Data for Open-Source Speech Foundation Model Training on EU Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01036/) (2024)
- [OCR Error Post-Correction with LLMs in Historical Documents: No Free Lunches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01205/) (2025)
- [Toxicity of the Commons: Curating Open-Source Pre-Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22587/) (2024)
- [The KL3M Data Project: Copyright-Clean Training Resources for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07854/) (2025)
- [A Common Pool of Privacy Problems: Legal and Technical Lessons from a Large-Scale Web-Scraped Machine Learning Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17185/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [propella-1: Multi-Property Document Annotation for LLM Data Curation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12414/) (2026)
- [KletterMix: Climbing Toward High-Quality German Pretraining Data - The Full Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03773/) (2026)
- [A Sovereign, Open-Source Foundation Model for German and English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09424/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model development relies on large-scale training corpora, yet most contain data of unclear licensing status, limiting the development of truly open models. This problem is exacerbated for non-English languages, where openly licensed text remains critically scarce. We introduce the German Commons, the largest collection of openly licensed German text to date. It compiles data from 41 sources across seven domains, encompassing legal, scientific, cultural, political, news, economic, and web text. Through systematic sourcing from established data providers with verifiable licensing, it yields 154.56 billion tokens of high-quality text for language model training. Our processing pipeline implements comprehensive quality filtering, deduplication, and text formatting fixes, ensuring consistent quality across heterogeneous text sources. All domain subsets feature licenses of at least CC-BY-SA 4.0 or equivalent, ensuring legal compliance for model training and redistribution. The German Commons therefore addresses the critical gap in openly licensed German pretraining data, and enables the development of truly open German language models. We also release code for corpus construction and data filtering tailored to German language text, rendering the German Commons fully reproducible and extensible.