Barcelona Declaration: 45 organisations commit to taking a lead for open research information
Making open research information the norm is the first of four commitments made by the 45 signatories of the Barcelona Declaration on open research information, published on 16/04/2024. Among them, organisations and universities from several European and American countries and international research groups.
The signatories are committed to:
• "work with services and systems that support and enable open research information;
• support the sustainability of infrastructures for open research information;
• support collective action to accelerate the transition to openness of research information".
"To advance responsible research assessment and open science and to promote unbiased high-quality decision making, there is an urgent need to make research information openly available through open scholarly infrastructures," they write.
"The research information landscape requires fundamental change. We commit to taking a lead in reforming the landscape and transforming our practices."
The four commitments in detail
As organisations that conduct, fund and assess research, the signatories are committed to respect four points.
Research information
By "research information", the declaration refers to information relating to the implementation and communication of research. This includes:
- bibliographic metadata such as titles, abstracts, references, data on authors, data on affiliation and data on places of publication;
- metadata on research software, research data, samples and instruments;
- information on funding and grants;
- and information on organisations and research contributors.
Research information can be found in systems such as bibliographic databases, software archives, data warehouses and institutional research information systems.
Essential information for research funding, evaluation and strategy
"Vast amounts of information are being used to manage the research enterprise, from information about research actors and their activities to information about inputs and outputs in the research process and signals of the use, esteem, and societal impact of research", states the preamble to the declaration.
"This information often plays a vital role in the distribution of resources and the evaluation of researchers and institutions, is used by RPO Research Performing Organisation and RFO Research Funding Organisation to set strategic priorities and is also indispensable for researchers and societal stakeholders to find and assess relevant research outputs."
"As a research community, we have become very dependent on closed infrastructures"
"However, a large share of all research information is locked inside proprietary infrastructures. It is managed by companies that are accountable primarily to their shareholders, not to the research community", which has become "strongly reliant on closed infrastructures:
- We have ended up assessing researchers and institutions based on non-transparent evidence,
- we are monitoring and incentivising open science using closed data,
- we are also routinely making decisions based on information that is biased against less privileged languages, geographical regions, and research agendas.
This is why the signatories believe that "openness of research information must be the new norm".
Transparency and openness "must be tackled together" to make real progress
"We’ve been working as part of various communities for almost 20 years, with an effort towards more transparency and openness. But we realised these things must be tackled together, structurally and systematically, to make real progress. That’s why the Declaration focuses on openness as a requirement for purchasing", explains Cameron Neylon, co-lead of COKI Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative and one of the three coordinators of the Barcelona Declaration, together with Ludo Waltman and Bianca Kramer.
Curtin open knowledge initiative was founded in 2017 at Curtin University in Perth (Australia) with the aim of becoming a "global centre for the analysis and evaluation of open knowledge in higher education".
"We will bring together signatories probably later in 2024 and agree on several very concrete action lines towards implementation", adds Ludo Waltman, Director of the CWTS Centre for Science and Technology Studies at the University of Leiden (Netherlands).
Procurement terms and sharing experience: two fundamental points
"In the meantime, we are hoping the Declaration will raise more awareness, and result in more institutions and funders signing up", says Bianca Kramer, founder of the consulting firm Sesame Open Science.
According to Cameron Neylon, "two basic elements are important to get right:
- Standardised procurement terms: there need to be a space to share those concrete documents that can be used for agreements, for example with a scholarly publisher about the openness of metadata they are generating and we are paying for;
- Experience of this transition: Sorbonne University (France) has announced it has cancelled its subscription to Web of Science and is now working with OpenAlex, what does that mean to navigate the practicalities? Could it be possible to share this experience, and perhaps the tools they have developed, to understand how to move forward and what else we need? The evaluation system will not go away, we still need indicators, tools, and approaches. Doing that together, we will go a lot further."
A declaration born from around 25 experts gathered in Barcelona in November 2023
To prepare the Barcelona Declaration, a workshop was organised by the Siris Foundation in Barcelona in November 2023, with a group of around 25 experts from organisations that implement, fund and evaluate research, and organisations that provide research information infrastructures.
"We then drafted the declaration and gathered feedback from a wider audience to ensure that it resonated globally with those who were prepared to sign it," says Bianca Kramer.
"We all have quite a large network and we did a lot of lobbying to convince organisations to support this movement. We have obtained more than 40 signatures and I expect there to be many more in the coming months", adds Ludo Waltman.
Sorbonne University's choice to sign the declaration
"Basing the reputation of a research institution on international rankings derived from proprietary databases can undermine its legitimacy in the eyes of society and its researchers", says Nathalie Drach-Temam, President of Sorbonne University (France), to News Tank on 16/04/2024, explaining that the signature of the Barcelona Declaration was "a no-brainer".
Sorbonne University will also participate in the future coalition of signatories, of which it could host the first meeting in autumn 2024.
"We have put its principles into practice by unsubscribing from the Web of Science and deciding to rely on open tools such as OpenAlex", since 01/01/2024, the president reports.
The university, ranked as the 46th best university in the world, will have to "redeploy human resources to improve metadata in open infrastructures. This work will benefit everyone and will be based on shared repositories".
Questionning the relevance of rankings
The University of Zurich left the THE ranking in March 2024, when "most universities choose to deliver data to THE, but it is not made openly available, the ranking only shows a few aggregated, high-level statistics", says Ludo Waltman.
"Any organisation signing up to initiatives like the Barcelona Declaration is expressing support for open research information and should consider moving to a way whereby all the data delivered to ranking providers are made publicly available."
Nathalie Drach-Temam tells News Tank that it is "part of a growing trend to question the relevance of these international rankings. Indeed, Zurich recognises the limits of these tools and the need to move towards indicators that are more representative of the value of a university".
She adds that Sorbonne University hasn't made that choice yet, as "it remains focused on developing more relevant bibliometric tools".
A version of the 2023 edition of the Leiden ranking list, based on open and reproducible data, was published by the CWTS at Leiden University (Netherlands) on 30/01/2024. According to the centre, it is the "first completely transparent university ranking", offering "a rigour absent from traditional ranking systems".
Ludo Waltman sees this initiative (on which he also collaborated) and the Barcelona Declaration "as two critical steps in the trajectory towards open research information".