Barcelona Declaration

Open Research Information – The University of Göttingen supports the 'Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information'

The University of Göttingen signed the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information on 28 August 2024. In doing so, the University of Göttingen is joining prominent international partners who are committed to opening up research information.

What is open research information?

Research information includes data representing research publications, persons and institutions involved as well as third-party funded projects that made these publications possible.

Until now, not all research information is publicly accessible. This makes it difficult to discover research results and hinders their societal impact. In addition, instruments for evaluating research such as university rankings or citation databases are dominated by a few commercial providers and scientific publishers. They restrict the use of their expensive data products, which makes it considerably more difficult to understand and reproduce the analyses and evaluations based on them.

How does the SUB Göttingen contribute to the opening of research information?

The Göttingen State and University Library is already committed to the principles of the 'Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information'. Our focus is on metadata about research publications. We want this metadata to be openly accessible to all.

We will make openness the default for the research information we use and produce

Ad Barcelona Commitment 1: We will make openness the default for the research information we use and produce!

Ad Barcelona Commitment 2: We will work with services and systems that support and enable open research information

Ad Barcelona Commitment 3: We will support the sustainability of infrastructures for open research information

The SUB Göttingen financially supports essential open infrastructures through memberships and uses its data and services. They include

Ad Barcelona Commitment 4: We will support collective action to accelerate the transition to openness of research information

We participate in numerous relevant third-party funded projects and initiatives to improve infrastructures for open research information. For example the SUB Göttingen is coordinating the development of an open bibliometrics database with the focus on Germany in the BMBF-funded consortium Kompetenznetzwerk Bibliometrie. The SUB Göttingen promotes the data literacy of staff entrusted with research information through relevant training courses based on the Carpentries, which are being further developed for the community in the DFG project „Open Access Datenpraxis“. We develop tools for automated access to open research information within international open science communities (rOpenSci) and make our high-performance Open Scholarly Data Warehouse based on Google BigQuery publicly available. The SUB Göttingen is active in the DINI AG FIS.