The open-access movement set out to free the contents of research — the articles themselves — from behind paywalls, and it has made remarkable progress. But there is a second, quieter layer of closure that has attracted far less attention and arguably matters just as much: the closure of research information itself. The metadata that describes the scholarly record — which work cites which, who authored what, which grant funded which project, how outputs connect to people and institutions — has historically been concentrated inside expensive, proprietary databases owned by a handful of companies. Decisions about funding, hiring and promotion are routinely made using this information, yet the information is not open: it cannot be freely inspected, corrected or built upon. The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information, launched in 2024, is a direct response to this state of affairs, and it sits squarely within the research information systems domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.
The problem of closed research information
To see why this matters, consider how research is assessed. When a committee evaluates a researcher, a department or an institution, it leans heavily on bibliometric data — publication counts, citation counts, indicators derived from them. For decades this data has come predominantly from proprietary platforms. That creates several deep problems. The data is not transparent: outsiders cannot verify how it was compiled or what it includes and excludes, so the numbers shaping careers rest on workings no one can check. It is not freely correctable: errors and gaps persist because the wider community cannot fix them. Its coverage is uneven, often skewed towards particular languages, regions and disciplines, which means the picture it paints is partial in ways that disadvantage whole research communities. And reliance on it locks institutions into costly dependencies on commercial vendors for the basic facts about their own research. Information used to make consequential public decisions ought to be open to scrutiny; too much of it is not.
What the Barcelona Declaration commits to
The Declaration responds by asking signatories — research-performing and research-funding organisations — to make a set of concrete commitments. Its central pledges include:
- Making openness the default for the research information they use and produce. Rather than treating open information as a nice-to-have, signatories commit to making it the normal expectation.
- Working with services that support open research information. Signatories undertake to use and prefer open infrastructures over closed proprietary ones where they can.
- Supporting the sustainability of open infrastructures. Open services need funding and stewardship to survive, and signatories commit to helping sustain them rather than free-riding.
- Reforming reliance on closed information in assessment. The Declaration connects directly to the broader research-assessment reform movement, encouraging a move away from evaluation built on opaque proprietary data.
The thread running through all of these is a shift in default. Closed has been the default and open the exception; the Declaration seeks to reverse that.
The open infrastructures it builds on
The Declaration is credible because viable open alternatives now exist. Crossref has long provided open metadata about scholarly publications, and crucially has championed open citation data, encouraging publishers to make the reference lists in their articles openly available. OpenCitations is dedicated specifically to open citation data, building an openly available record of which works cite which — the citation graph that proprietary databases had kept enclosed. OpenAlex offers a comprehensive, openly available index of the scholarly world — works, authors, institutions, sources and the connections between them — explicitly positioned as an open counterpart to the proprietary databases that preceded it. These services demonstrate that the metadata layer of research can be a genuine commons rather than a private asset, and the Barcelona Declaration is in large part a commitment to use, prefer and sustain infrastructures like these.
The link to assessment reform
Open research information is not an end in itself; it is the foundation for fairer evaluation. The wider movement to reform research assessment — to judge research on its substance rather than on narrow proprietary metrics — cannot fully succeed while the underlying data remains closed and opaque. If the numbers feeding an evaluation cannot be inspected or corrected, the evaluation cannot be truly accountable. By insisting that the information underpinning assessment be open, the Declaration supplies a precondition for that reform: only when the data is transparent can the community scrutinise how research is being judged and hold the judgements to account. Open information and fair assessment are two parts of the same project.
Building on, not replacing, research information systems
Open research information complements rather than supplants the systems institutions already run to manage their research records. Current research information systems — the platforms that hold an organisation’s publications, projects, people and outputs — become far more powerful when they can draw on and contribute to open, interoperable sources rather than depending on closed feeds. Our writing on the fundamentals of research information sets out how these systems fit together; the Barcelona Declaration adds the principle that the information flowing between them should be open by default.
A consistent vocabulary for open information
Open information is only useful if it is interoperable, and interoperability depends on shared meaning. For citations, contributions, affiliations, funding links and output types to be exchanged across open infrastructures, those elements must mean the same thing everywhere — otherwise “open” data simply becomes a larger pile of incompatible records. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: a shared vocabulary so that open research information is understood identically wherever it originates. And because the contributions recorded in that information are part of the scholarly record, they can be described in the same shared framework — the CRediT taxonomy and its full set of contribution roles. The Barcelona Declaration recognises that you cannot have a fair, accountable research system built on information no one is allowed to see; opening that information is the work it sets out to advance.