The Barcelona Declaration… exploring our responsibilities as metadata consumers - TL;DR - Digital Science

"The first commitment of the Barcelona Agreement articulates that, ‘We will make openness the default for the research information that we use and produce’, but who ‘we’ are is critical in understanding all of our roles and responsibilities in the research ecosystem. Funders, publishers, infrastructure providers, institutions and researchers all have different ways of interacting with data in their contexts as producers, consumers and aggregators of data.  

The Barcelona Declaration is perhaps the first document to begin to frame community responsibility with regards to consuming open metadata. Yet, it is just that, a beginning – we believe that understanding with granular detail what should be expected from each part of our ecosystem is critical in making Barcelona actionable, to drive us forward into a more open metadata landscape. Indeed, open metadata is only important if we commit to using it in our practice, allowing it to shape the way that we interact across the research world.

A commitment to consume, however, still requires us to pay attention to the type of open metadata that we use, the contexts in which we apply it, and the expectations that we place on others when doing so. Without explicitly articulating our roles both as creators as well as consumers of research metadata, we risk creating an open, yet untrusted research landscape...."