Barcelona Declaration Working Groups
Update May 2025
The Barcelona Declaration working groups were established to promote collective action around the transition to open research information. The Barcelona Declaration calls upon organizations performing, funding and evaluating research to move towards open research information. In many areas, true progress requires collaboration and collective work to overcome barriers. Such actions also often involve collaboration with organizations providing data, services and infrastructures.
Last year at the Paris Conference on Open Research Information, signatories and supporters of the Barcelona Declaration came together to discuss areas where such collective action would be beneficial. This resulted in the Roadmap on Open Research Information, which is included in full in the conference report. Following the conference, working groups were convened around each of the identified areas of interest. Working groups are coordinated by representatives of signatories of the Declaration.
Below we list the working groups that have been established. These working groups are currently in the process of developing a set of concrete actions and organizing their activities accordingly, in some cases in separate task forces. All working groups will present themselves at the Bologna Meeting on Open Research Information on May 28th, where they will discuss their plans with the community. Online participation in the meeting is possible if you’d like to hear more!
The working groups
Working group 1 - Journal article metadata and book metadata
Coordinators: Ludo Waltman (Leiden University), Judith Naidorf, Mariangela Napoli (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales - CLACSO)
This working group aims to ensure that key metadata are made openly available by publishers. As part of this, the working group also aims to develop a framework that describes key metadata elements. Actions of this working group include coordinating the inclusion of comprehensive open metadata in negotiations with publishers and creating affordable ways for poorly-resourced publishers to make metadata openly available.
Working group 2 - Metadata for research outputs in institutional repositories, preprint repositories and data repositories
Coordinator: Bianca Kramer (Barcelona Declaration) - interim
This topic represents an interest in the general program of expanding the set of research output types for which high quality metadata is available and ensuring that this growth contributes to the expansion of open research information systems. Actions in this working group include proposing guidelines for metadata validation/moderation in IRs, including prioritization of metadata elements most relevant for research organizations, and organizing a meeting / hackathon to bring together existing initiatives around machine-learning pipelines to detect datasets and software from full-text.
Working group 3 - Funding metadata
Coordinators: Hans de Jonge (Dutch Research Council - NWO), Katharina Rieck (Austrian Science Fund - FWF), Zoé Ancion (Agence Nationale de la Recherche - ANR)
The focus of this working group is on improving the availability of funding metadata. The group will organize a workshop with vendors, publishers and funders to discuss how submission and production systems can better support the registration of grant metadata and will produce a set of resources to show how funders are making grant metadata available for advocacy and for improving the use of standards.
Working group 4 - Replacing closed systems for research information
Coordinators: Amélie Church (Sorbonne Université) and Ignasi Labastida (Universitat de Barcelona)
This working group focuses on pathways for the adoption of open research information systems. This requires coordination of action, for instance with regard to canceling subscriptions to closed infrastructures. Capacity building and training is a further need to support a transition away from existing systems and expertises, which is often challenging in an institutional context. Actions of this working group include developing and distributing a survey to make an inventory of user stories and organizing access to required training to support the active use of open research information.
Working group 5 - Sustainability of infrastructures
Coordinator(s): to be finalized
Sustaining infrastructures over time is a long standing concern, with the need to bridge the interests of those expected to pay and those who need resourcing. There is substantial value seen in gathering a broader range of information on what resourcing is currently being deployed and to encourage signatories to commit to support in the medium to longer term. We want to think carefully about how this working group can have the most added value alongside other initiatives in this space, and are also looking for strong university leadership to make this happen.
Working group 6 - Evaluating open data sources
Coordinator: Stefano Bolelli Gallevi (Università degli Studi di Milano)
This working group focuses on the quality and completeness of open research information sources, e.g. by developing and implementing monitoring frameworks and considering requirements and standards for the quality and completeness of (meta)data. Planned actions include identifying open research information sources, developing a set of criteria and supporting projects for their adoption and evaluation, and implementing evaluation tools and methods in a monitoring framework.
Working group 7 - Evidence of benefits of open research information
Coordinators: Núria Benítez Monforte (Institució CERCA) and Christian Hauschke (TIB - Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology)
This working group aims to identify and articulate possible benefits of open research information, and make these benefits clear both to researchers and more widely to research leadership and managers. The planned actions of the working group focus on collecting case studies of use of signatories’ open research information and creating a stakeholder map and taxonomy of benefits.
Looking forward
As the working groups embark on the above actions, with the ultimate aim of helping organizations transition to open research information, two factors are important for their success.
Geographical representation
Current working group members roughly reflect the demographics of the Barcelona Declaration signatories, with a strong representation from Western and Southern Europe, although we are happy to have active representation from organizations in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East as well. We hope to broaden this representation and invite organizations anywhere in the world to express their interest in participating in the working groups.
Participation in the working groups is not limited to organizations that are signatories of the Barcelona Declaration. If your organization is interested in contributing to the transition to open research information, but has not (yet) signed the Declaration, the working groups would be a good way to get involved!
Alignment with other initiatives
Another key factor is checking for alignment with existing initiatives and making use of existing resources and information. Existing initiatives where actions are already planned and/or implemented include, among others, the CoARA working group Towards Open Infrastructures for Responsible Research Assessment, the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS), Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), the Open Science Monitoring Initiative (OSMI) and Transparency to Sustain Open Science Infrastructure (TSOSI) (to be announced June 1).
In addition, the Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET) was set up to explore ways for community enrichment of metadata, a topic of considerable interest for many Barcelona Declaration signatories and supporters.
In many cases, representatives of these initiatives are already participating in Barcelona Declaration working groups and vice versa, making sharing of information easier. We will also actively reach out to various organizations to discuss future alignment and potential for cross-fertilization where efforts around open research information, research assessment and open science intersect.
Stay tuned!
All working groups will present themselves at the Bologna Meeting on Open Research Information on May 28th, where they will discuss their plans with the community.
Please sign up here if you’re interested in attending the meeting online.
Following the Bologna Meeting on Open Research Information, we also intend to publish a series of posts highlighting each Barcelona Declaration working group in turn, sharing more information about their plans for action and ways to be informed and involved.