The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information
On April 16th, 2024, forty organizations signed the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information, aiming to uphold academic independence from for-profit service providers. This declaration urges research institutions to align with shared principles for open research information and commit to developing transparent research data infrastructures. Invitation to the signing of the declaration.
The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information is the result from a November 2023 workshop initiated by the SIRIS foundation, which gathered research information experts from various organizations.
The declaration highlights the necessity for increased transparency in the process of academic knowledge production. Just as with academic publications, research metadata—information about publications, their authors, and citations—is confined within platforms operated by for-profit service providers.
The declaration’s signatories advocate for a fundamental transformation of the research information landscape through collaborative efforts. To ensure a transparent research data ecosystem, they pledge to follow the FAIR principles – findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability.
Signatories include universities, research funding organizations, and governments, along with academic open data publishers like Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID, aggregates such as OpenAlex, OpenCitations, and OpenAIRE, discipline-specific Open Access platforms like PubMed and Europe PMC, and national and local infrastructures like La Referencia, SciELO, and Redalyc.
They commit to:
1. Publishing data as open data under a Creative Commons CC0 waiver or public domain dedication;
2. Building data infrastructures connected to a wider ecosystem for open research data using standardized protocols;
3. Publishing machine-readable data using internationally recognized standards; and
4. Using existing persistent identifiers like Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCIDs), and Research Organization Registry (ROR) to reference research outputs, researchers, organizations, and other entities.
The Barcelona Declaration remains open for additional signatories.
“Can copyright bring artificial intelligence to its knees? Which other circumstances may cause that the “making” of generative AI can dramatically change in the (near) future. This short paper presents potential challenges that copyright poses to the training of the machines on large amount of data. Different jurisdictions address these issues differently. In the USA the legality of these activities is tested in several court cases. Do gentlemen’s agreements and pragmatic symbiosis known from the “search engines business model” provide sufficient basis and/or incentive for the business model of “making” generative AI business model as well?
On Friday, September 27, 2024, the last day of the international conference “Converging Realms: Law, Technology, and Society in the Age of Ethical and Multi-Agent AI” took place. Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič took part in the 4th panel entitled Artificial Intelligence+Research.
Today, September 26, 2024, a specialist training for persons who will perform the role of data stewards or related profiles of data experts was organized by the Central Technical Library (CTK) at the University of Ljubljana as part of the SPOZNAJ project, at which Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič also lectured on the subject of open science and copyright.
At the end of this week, between September 26 and September 27, 2024, Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič will attend the international conference “Converging Realms: Law, Technology, and Society in the Age of Ethical and Multi-Agent AI”.