The declaration calls upon organizations performing, funding, and evaluating research to take action to help make openness of research information the norm. Three of its drafters explain how.
In November of 2023 a group of more than 25 experts from organizations that conduct, fund, and evaluate research or provide research information infrastructures met to discuss the necessity of open research information. This led to the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information, launched in the spring of 2024. In this Q and A conducted by Demmy Verbeke (DV), coordinators Bianca Kramer (BK) (Sesame Open Science), Cameron Neylon (CN) (Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative, Curtin University), and Ludo Waltman (LW) (Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University), explain what the declaration is and how it could impact research libraries.
DV: What is the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information?
BK, CN, and LW: The Barcelona Declaration is an initiative that calls upon organizations performing, funding, and evaluating research to take action to make openness of research information the norm by transforming their own practices. To this end, the signatories commit to four things: making openness of research information the default, working with services and systems that support and enable open research information, supporting the sustainability of infrastructures for open research information, and working together to realize the transition from closed to open research information.
DV: What do you consider to be “research information”?
BK, CN, and LW: This is a question we get asked a lot, as people often think this is about research data and other research outputs. However, by research information we mean information about inputs and outputs of the research process and about research actors and their activities. This is often also referred to as “metadata.” As such, research information includes, but is not limited to bibliographic metadata like titles, abstracts, references, author data, affiliation data, and data on publication venues, but also metadata on research software, research data, samples, and instruments, as well as information on funding and grants, and information on organizations and research contributors.
Research information is located in systems such as bibliographic databases, software archives, data repositories, and current research information systems (also known as CRIS). Often, especially in the case of bibliographic databases, these are closed systems with selective coverage, meaning the information cannot be freely accessed, used, or shared, and is often also biased against less privileged languages, geographical regions, and research agendas.
Information in CRIS systems is also often not openly available—e.g., many universities have a research portal displaying information on publications and other research output based on their CRIS, but this information cannot be downloaded, or can only be downloaded in limited quantities and with insufficient metadata, or only with proprietary identifiers.
We want to emphasize that the Barcelona Declaration does not ask for research-performing and funding universities to make all internal information they have on research activities publicly available. There can be good reasons why openness would be inappropriate, e.g., for privacy-sensitive or internal financial information. Here, the same applies as to research data: “as open as possible, as closed as necessary.” However, for research information that organizations are happy to make available in proprietary systems like Web of Science and Scopus, we believe organizations should have no reservations about making this information openly available.
DV: How does the Barcelona Declaration relate to statements about research assessment like the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (2013), the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics (2015), or the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (2022) of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment?
BK, CN, and LW: Research information is often crucial in decision-making around strategic priorities, distribution of resources, and evaluation of researchers and institutions—in other words, crucial for research assessment. The Barcelona Declaration therefore builds naturally on various influential statements about responsible research assessment. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), for instance, includes a recommendation to remove all limitations on reuse of reference lists in research articles and to make these openly available under the Creative Commons Public Domain Deed. One of the principles of the Leiden Manifesto is to keep data collection and analytical processes open and transparent, and the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment similarly emphasizes the importance of ensuring independence and transparency of the data, infrastructure, and criteria necessary for research assessment and determining research impacts. In short, we consider openness of research information to be an important factor contributing to responsible research assessment.
We’d also like to mention that while research information is important for research assessment, it is also used for other purposes, e.g., for both researchers and societal stakeholders to search and filter relevant publications and other research outputs. Openness of research information is important for these use cases too!
DV: Is this connected to open access?
BK, CN, and LW: Whereas open access is about the full text of research articles and books being available for use, reuse, and modification under an open license, the Barcelona Declaration is about the metadata of publications and other research outputs. They are closely related but different aspects of open science. We are asking for open metadata for all publications, even if they are not open access themselves. In addition, even for publications that are open access, the metadata are not necessarily openly available. In fact, when negotiating open access agreements with publishers, universities often include the condition that the publisher provide them with the metadata on the articles published under the agreement (including affiliation and funding information). However, very few require that the publisher (also) make this information openly available by including it in the metadata they provide to Crossref.
Besides the link with open access publications, open research information also has a link with open research data in that for both, the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) principles are important in addition to the principle of openness. For example, the Declaration emphasizes the importance of the use of standardized persistent identifiers (PIDs) (like DOIs, ROR, and ORCID) to support findability and interoperability, and the use of a Creative Commons CC0 waiver or public domain dedication as appropriate to support interoperability and reusability.
DV: The name makes one wonder whether this is a European initiative. However, is it not necessary to take a global approach to research information?
BK, CN, and LW: The name was a coincidence in the sense that the workshop was hosted in Barcelona, and it seemed beneficial for name recognition to include it in the name of the Declaration. It also happens to align nicely with the three seminal declarations about open access all starting with B … More seriously though, yes, the initiative has had an initial focus on European organizations—not least because of the current efforts in Europe around reforming research assessment that we just discussed. However, from the start we also connected with Latin America (with CLACSO (the Latin American Council of Social Sciences) being among the first signatories), and we have already had important conversations with Latin American organizations (including infrastructure providers) about the importance of diversity in data sources and approaches to metadata provision (see for instance this blog post). From Africa, we have WACREN (the West and Central African Research and Education Network) and the African PID Alliance among our signatories and supporters, which we hope will help bring additional perspectives to discussions around the Declaration. We are also having important conversations about the Declaration with key stakeholders in the US, and one of us (Cameron Neylon) is based in Australia, offering a perspective from that part of the world. Having said this, we do recognize the risk of our perspectives being biased toward particular parts of the world, and we fully agree that any approach to research information should take global perspectives into account, not just those of specific regions.
DV: Should the libraries of universities or other institutions who have expressed support for the declaration cancel their subscriptions to research information tools like Web of Science, Scopus, or Dimensions?
BK, CN, and LW: We’d like to stress that the Declaration is aspirational, and as such, there are no set expectations or requirements for organizations that want to sign, nor is signing in any way a legal commitment. We do expect organizations that sign the Declaration to be serious about the commitments in the Declaration and willing to undertake actions towards them. This might include exploring what would be needed to move away from closed to more open data sources and also sharing relevant experiences. Some organizations, like Sorbonne University in Paris, are at the forefront of this transition, and their experiences could be informative for other organizations. At the same time, we expect that organizations will set their own priorities, and actions around the Declaration could, for instance, also involve negotiating open metadata in publisher contracts or working toward making research information in CRIS systems openly available. In short, we would love to see organizations move from closed to more open data sources, and it’s an important element of the Declaration. But the idea behind the Declaration is to encourage and facilitate, rather than to enforce such actions.
DV: One of the commitments listed in the declaration is supporting the sustainability of infrastructures for open research information. Are you thinking of libraries redirecting collection budget in order to do this, or do you have something else in mind?
BK, CN, and LW: That could certainly be an option. But we recognize that the way budgets are divided and allocated varies greatly among organizations, and again, we want to encourage and facilitate, not prescribe. What we think is important for organizations is to take seriously their responsibility for supporting these infrastructures—which can only continue to exist, and develop further, if they are both used and supported. That includes financial support but could also involve participating in governance and in-kind efforts, e.g., contributing data and helping improve data quality. Regarding financial contributions, here again Sorbonne University is a great example—when they unsubscribed from Web of Science, they redirected part of that budget to supporting OpenAlex. In general, we advocate making investments in open infrastructure an integral part of institutional budgets. We hope to help further conversations among research-performing and funding organizations around the possibilities for doing so, and how to overcome any obstacles they face.
DV: What else can libraries do to promote the principles behind the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information?
BK, CN, and LW: Individually, libraries can work within their organizations to promote the use of open research information, e.g., by including relevant sources in information literacy education as well as exploring their use in internal processes, both within the library and within the organization as a whole (e.g., for research management). They can also explore options to (re)direct financial support toward open infrastructures for research information, as discussed above. While these actions will to some extent always be dependent on local context, there is also benefit in research-performing and funding organizations working together, both with each other and with organizations providing data, services, and infrastructures, to advance this agenda.
To this end, we organized the Paris Conference on Open Research Information in September 2024, where signatories and supporting organizations of the Barcelona Declaration came together to exchange expertise and experiences around open research information and to collectively define concrete actions they could take together. We identified several areas of focus, including journal article metadata, funding information, evaluating existing open-data sources, moving from closed- to open-data sources, supporting open infrastructures, and collecting evidence on the benefits of using open research information. This has resulted in a roadmap for next steps, which for each of these areas includes actions involving bringing together information, developing a shared understanding of (minimum) requirements, developing principles/guidelines as a shared base for action, and defining concrete implementation steps.
Many of these next steps are already in progress, and our intent is to bring together interested organizations to work together on specific actions that will help all signatories to the Barcelona Declaration transform the way research information is used and produced and make openness of research information the norm.10.1146/katina-012225-1
