CREAF commits to open research information

CREAF has recently signed the Barcelona Declaration for Open Research Information (Barcelona DORI) and joins the more than 150 organizations that support it, including research centres, universities, science funding organizations, governments, scientific networks and consortia, in addition to related entities. Signatories include CERCA, CSUC, CSIC, UAB and UB.

Open research information refers to data that describes research, such as metadata of publications – authorship, affiliation, title, etc. –, funding sources and collaborations, to name a few. A large part of this content is managed from restricted access digital systems – such as Scopus or WoS –, which tend to convert metadata into metrics that are often not easy to decipher and may contain biases. “The delicate aspect of these indicators is that they are used to evaluate research staff and scientific institutions, to establish strategic priorities for research policies and to award prizes,” explains Florencia Florido, in charge of open science and knowledge manager at CREAF. Florido points out that these are unreliable metrics, “which govern the course of science globally and increase inequalities, because they harm underrepresented and less privileged disciplines, groups and languages”. 

One of the essential purposes of the Barcelona DORI Declaration is to make the metadata that qualify the research publicly available, to remove any restrictions on reuse and to be governed by the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). Its objective, therefore, is to “democratize and increase the impact of science, move towards a responsible evaluation of research, reduce the duplication of efforts and the waste of resources and prevent biases and malpractice”, points out Florencia Florido. 

The director of CREAF, Joan Pino Vilalta, states that by signing the Barcelona DORI Declaration “we are reinforcing our commitments to open science and to the reform of research evaluation promoted by the CoARA Agreement, to which we adhered more than a year ago, included in our human resources strategy”. 

In a very graphic way, Florencia Florido argues that the relationship between metadata and scientific data is comparable to the labels on food jars. “Can you imagine having to pay to know its ingredients, its expiration date or its origin? It is worrying that the (meta)data of publicly funded works are not open access”.

Working groups are being consolidated from various organisations and governments, with the commitment to move towards a system in which the Barcelona DORI Declaration and its values ​​gain weight. In Catalonia, CERCA promotes various actions in collaboration with associated centres and has launched several working groups, which have their origins in the 2024 conference on the Barcelona DORI Declaration held in Paris, among which the following have been prioritised: ‘Journal article metadata’, ‘Replacing closed systems for research information’ and ‘Evidence of benefits of open research information’.