The document promotes the opening of data on research and support for the infrastructures that make it possible, to arrive at more transparent procedures for managing and evaluating the quality of research
L’University of Bologna subscribes to the “Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information“, a programmatic document that promotes the opening of information on research activities and encourages more democratic and transparent decision-making processes. The Alma Mater, among the first signatories, will thus contribute to defining the next commitments in favor of this sector of Open Science.
Drafted by a group of over 25 experts, the Declaration aims to facilitate the transition towards an open research information management system to arrive at more transparent procedures for managing and evaluating the quality of research.
Administrative, accounting and bibliographic information (think for example of citations), relating both to actual scientific results and to their use and impact, have in fact a fundamental role both in the distribution of resources and in the evaluation of researchers and institutions. Much of this information, however, are now managed within commercial infrastructureswho develop them on the basis of criteria that are only partially public and shared.
Instead, arriving at an open use of research data would make it possible to connect and integrate information from different sources. For this reason, the Barcelona Declaration promotes the openness of research data and support for the infrastructures that make it possible.
The fundamental commitments presented in the document are four: making the openness of research data the norm for scientific activities carried out in universities and research institutions; use services and systems that support and enable the openness of research information; support the infrastructure that makes this opening possible; support collective actions to accelerate the transition towards open research information.
The subscription of Barcelona Declaration is part of the already numerous initiatives promoted byUniversity of Bologna to encourage the openness of research data. Among these, the activities of Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadatato which open infrastructure refers OpenCitations, present among the supporters of the Barcelona Declaration together with other organizations and service providers. But the Alma Mater is also experimenting other Open Research Information infrastructurescome the OpenAIRE Monitor functionthe aggregator of bibliographic information and data relating to research projects of the European Research Area.
Furthermore, the University already makes bibliographic data available which describe scientific publications, doctoral theses and other outputs of research activities archived in institutional repositories, as well as institutional editorial services (AlmaDL) for journals, series and scientific monographs already make their metadata available in free and open form.
Finally, the University of Bologna it was the first Italian university to equip itself with a portal for administrative open datain line with the regulations that regulate the transparency of public administration data: a tool that could be used in the future to disseminate information relating to research projects and collaborations in an open form.