Photo © Cecilia Burman_SU
Currently, much infrastructure for research information is entirely closed, meaning that metadata is only accessible to organisations that pay subscription fees. Research information refers to information or metadata relating to the conduct, evaluation or communication of research. This may include metadata for scientific articles and other research publications, for individual researchers, or for research data and research software.
In an open scientific system, metadata relating to research is also a crucial component. Data and bibliographic databases used for research evaluation should be openly accessible and not locked up by commercial companies, and tools and technical systems should enable transparency in evaluation — which is not the case today", says Wilhelm Widmark, Senior Advisor for Open Science at Stockholm University.
The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information was prepared by a group of 25 experts in research information, representing organisations that conduct, fund, and evaluate research, as well as organisations that provide research information infrastructure. Signatories of the declaration commit to:
- making openness in research information the default;
- working with services and systems that support and enable open research information;
- supporting the sustainability of infrastructure for open research information;
- supporting collective action to accelerate the transition to openness of research information.
SU supports and advocates for many aspects of open science
Stockholm University, one of CIVIS member universities, actively works towards an open science system, where everyone has free and open access to scientific texts, research results, and research data. The university also supports several organisations that promote the use and creation of open metadata and practices of the use of open metadata in various ways. One of them is the open publication platform DiVA, which can be used to search for open research publications and as a source for statistics and evaluation - as it contains open metadata about research publications.
Together with other initiatives the university has signed, such as DORA and CoARA, which aim to change the research assessment, this declaration is another important step towards achieving an open scientific system," says Wilhelm Widmark.
Stockholm University also supports several open research infrastructure that handles open identifiers, such as being members of Crossref, which assigns and manages DOI identifiers for research publications, and ORCID, which assigns and manages ORCID identifiers for researchers. The university also supports Datacite, which manages DOI:s for research data via the SND consortium.