OSIRIS Solutions officially supports the Barcelona Declaration

A step towards more open, fair and sustainable research information

Today we are very pleased to announce that OSIRIS Solutions is now an official supporter of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information. For us, this is more than a formal step - it is a statement of our commitment to transparency, openness and collaborative research infrastructures.

What the Barcelona Declaration is all about

The Barcelona Declaration is a Europe-wide manifesto for open research information. At its core is the conviction that scientific information - whether publications, projects, people, infrastructures or other metadata - should not remain locked behind proprietary systems. Instead, it should be openly accessible, interoperable, machine-readable and freely usable.

The Declaration is in favour of research institutions retaining or obtaining sovereignty over their own data. It calls for a move away from compartmentalised, non-transparent solutions towards open standards, clear interfaces and a sustainable technical basis that serves research operations in the long term.

We share this vision one hundred per cent.

Why we are joining

For us, the decision to support the Declaration was not a strategic consideration, but a logical consequence of our day-to-day work.

Since its inception, OSIRIS has been developed as an open source research information system that focusses on transparency, fairness and self-determination of the institutions. We believe that research information generates the greatest added value when it can be freely linked and reused. Proprietary hurdles, non-transparent data models and limited export options stand in the way of this.

With OSIRIS, we are pursuing a different approach: open code, open standards and open interfaces, combined with a flexible technical basis that adapts to the requirements of research institutions and not the other way round. The Barcelona Declaration formulates precisely these principles - and at the same time brings together a growing community that shares the same values.

Our support is therefore a clear commitment to working together with other initiatives to create a European research landscape that is interoperable, accessible and sustainable. We are in good company here, as OSIRIS already includes systems from other supporters, such as CrossRef and DataCite for loading DOIs or ORCID, whose open API we are currently implementing.

Our commitment

As of today, we have submitted the official form and confirmed our support. For us, this means working even more actively towards open infrastructures, adopting new standards early on and developing tools together with other organisations that strengthen rather than restrict research institutions.

We see the Declaration as an opportunity to be part of a movement that is driving profound change: away from closed systems and towards an open, networked and collaboratively developed infrastructure world. We look forward to actively shaping this change.

A call to other organisations

We would like to encourage all research organisations, libraries, infrastructure operators and developers to take a look at the Barcelona Declaration. Every additional vote strengthens the common goal of liberating research information and making it usable for everyone in the long term.

More information and the full list of supporters can be found here: 👉 https://barcelona-declaration.org