Sorbonne University Signs the Barcelona Declaration

Too often, decision making in science is based on closed research information, restricted within proprietary infrastructures, and run by for-profit providers that impose severe restrictions on the use, reuse and sharing of information, originally produced by research institutions themselves.

Based on this observation and determined to change this system, more than 30 research or research funding institutions - including Sorbonne University – are today committing by signing this Declaration to make openness of research information¹ a requirement and the new norm.

Sorbonne University’s ambitious open science policy is fully aligned with the objectives of the Barcelona Declaration. This is also coherent with its engagement in the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (COARA) which advocates for, among other things, ensuring “independence and transparency of the data, infrastructure and criteria necessary for research assessment and for determining research impacts.”

Committed for many years to the development and promotion of open access, Sorbonne University was able to use the HAL-Sorbonne University repository² to lists its publication output for its five-year assessment by HCERES.

More recently, by unsubscribing to the “Web of Science”, a proprietary tool, and by planning to use open bibliometric databases such as OpenAlex to analyze its research output, Sorbonne University has anticipated the implementation of the commitments made by signing the Barcelona Declaration, thus taking a first step in changing the paradigm.

¹ Definition of research information
By research information we mean information (sometimes referred to as metadata) relating to the conduct and communication of research. This includes, but is not limited to, (1) bibliographic metadata such as titles, abstracts, references, author data, affiliation data, and data on publication venues, (2) metadata on research software, research data, samples, and instruments, (3) information on funding and grants, and (4) information on organizations and research contributors. Research information is located in systems such as bibliographic databases, software archives, data repositories, and current research information systems.
² HAL-Sorbonne University lists about 290.000 articles and documents, including more than 120.000 in full-text.