Our commitment to open research
In April 2024, Digital Science published four Open Principles — a concrete articulation of how we operate as a responsible stakeholder in the global research ecosystem. These principles guide our product decisions, our data practices, and our participation in the wider open science community.
Principle 1
Community ownership
Research outcomes belong to the global community and should be available to all.
Principle 2
Open infrastructure
We build on and contribute to open standards, open data, and open identifiers across all our products.
Principle 3
Stakeholders’ primacy
The needs of the research community always come first.
Principle 4
Establishing trust
We operate with transparency, responsibility, and sustainability.
Supporting the Barcelona Declaration
Digital Science’s Open Principles were published in alignment with the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information — a landmark global commitment to making openness the default for research information.
Barcelona: A beautiful horizon
We reflect on what this means for the future of open research infrastructure.
Exploring our responsibilities as metadata consumers
We explore how the Barcelona Declaration frames our roles in using open metadata responsibly—highlighting provenance, context, and trust in scholarly systems.
Tools that put principles into practice
Our products are designed from the ground up to support open research infrastructure. From persistent identifiers to open APIs and FAIR data principles, openness isn’t a feature — it’s the architecture.
Dimensions
Altmetric
Figshare
Symplectic Elements
Overleaf
Writefull
Scientometric Researcher Access to Data (SRAD)
We believe open research requires open infrastructure for studying research itself. Through our Scientometric Researcher Access to Data (SRAD) programme, we provide no-cost access to Altmetric and Dimensions data — including APIs and Dimensions on Google BigQuery — for non-commercial scientometric research projects.
SRAD is our practical answer to the Barcelona Declaration’s call for open research information: not just words, but access.
Understanding open research through evidence
Now in its tenth year, the State of Open Data Report — produced in collaboration with Figshare, Digital Science, and Springer Nature — provides the research community’s most sustained longitudinal study of researcher attitudes, behaviours, and barriers to open data sharing.
The report alternates between tracking what researchers tell us they are doing when it comes to research data publication, and deep dives into quantifying what is actually happening.
