FIZ Karlsruhe at the 9th Library Congress: steps towards implementing the Barcelona declaration

Karlsruhe, 26 June 2025 – At the 9th Library Congress 2025 held in Bremen on June 25, Prof. Dr. Wolfram Horstmann, President and CEO of FIZ Karlsruhe, presented the strategic steps with which his institute is implementing the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information. In his presentation entitled “Steps towards Implementing the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information at FIZ Karlsruhe”, he showed how FIZ Karlsruhe, as a central scientific infrastructure facility, links the principles of this international initiative with specific projects and services.

The Barcelona Declaration formulates four central voluntary commitments for an open, networked and sustainable research information landscape - and FIZ Karlsruhe has already made pioneering contributions to each of these points:

“Openness as default“ has long been part of FIZ Karlsruhe's daily practice. This is reflected not only in the institute's Open Access policy, but also in the consistent orientation of services such as zbMath Open, one of the world's leading Open Access services for specialist mathematical information.

Cooperation with services to support open research information is another guiding principle. FIZ Karlsruhe acts as a technological hub, among other things as part of the Competence Network Bibliometrics (KB), which promotes open access to science-related metrics and indicators.

The sustainability of infrastructures is not seen as a purely technical challenge at FIZ Karlsruhe, but as an integral part of long-term sustainable scientific communication. This includes processes for quality assurance, data enrichment and reliability - for example when working with OpenAlex databases.

Supporting collective action - under this guiding principle, FIZ Karlsruhe is actively involved in initiatives such as the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) or international organizations such as the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA).

In his outlook, Prof. Horstmann emphasized that FIZ Karlsruhe wants to further advance the interlinking of global sources for research information  through sustainable, synchronized and open services that create a reliable basis for research evaluation and management. The institute is thus positioning itself not only as a service provider, but also as an active shaper of the open science movement.

His contribution made it clear that open research information is not an end in itself, but the foundation for transparent, cooperative and sustainable science. FIZ Karlsruhe is pursuing this path with strategic vision, technological expertise and in close cooperation with partners from science, politics and infrastructure.