The University Rey Juan Carlos approved on January 31 a document that makes a clear commitment to open knowledge. This document collects the institution’s willingness to integrate, among its activities, institutional policies, and future plans, the creation of an environment that fosters open science and education. To achieve this, it will provide the necessary mechanisms and actions.

This declaration aligns with the achievement of the general objectives of the ‘Strategic Plan 2020-2025’ and those of the ‘URJC-2030’ project, “which promotes and aligns the efforts of the university community around the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the ‘Agenda 2030’ established by the United Nations, especially in the areas of Quality Education (SDG 4) and Research and Innovation (SDG 9)”, it is stated in the declaration.

This fact confirms all the steps taken by the URJC in its commitment to open knowledge and education. In this sense, the University Rey Juan Carlos has been offering, since 2013, several MOOCs on the MiriadaX platform and has its own platform, URJCx, since the 2015/2016 academic year.

Regarding open research and science, and in line with projects such as the European Open Science Cloud or the RECOLECTA platform of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT), among others, the URJC has been working for over a decade in the working groups of the University Libraries Network (REBIUN). The objective of this work is, among others, “to enhance institutional research and teaching content repositories and take advantage of technologies and interoperability to promote new value-added services”, as stated.

In this area, the University also signed, in 2017, the ‘Declaration of the Madroño Consortium in support of Open Science and Academic and Scientific Information’ and has specific infrastructure to facilitate the publication, dissemination, and preservation of these materials, such as the institutional repository BURJC-Digital, which has a publications council.

Additionally, the URJC has a digitized heritage available on the audiovisual portal TVURJC, which already has over 3,800 videos.

All these initiatives have their roots in the free software movement, which, since its origins over 30 years ago, has developed legal, technical, economic, and philosophical mechanisms that not only have had a huge impact on today’s society but have also laid the foundations for the rest of the open knowledge movements", it is indicated in the document. The University Rey Juan Carlos has been part of the international community of free software users and producers for many years. Tools like the virtual classroom and the MyApps application suite respond to these principles.

These actions converged in December 2018 with the creation of OfiLibre, which has allowed this university to act as a pioneer in this field, “taking a step further towards a university community that is a deep change agent in terms of the forms of knowledge generation, sharing, and dissemination in all areas”.

With this declaration, the URJC joins a wide range of national and international standards:

• It fully subscribes to the principles declared in the document ‘University Commitments’ before the Open Science approved at the General Assembly of the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE).
• It ratifies the commitment manifested in the declaration of the Madroño Consortium in support of Open Science and Academic and Scientific Information.
• It adheres to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in Sciences and Humanities.
• It manifests its agreement with UNESCO and its declaration on Free Access to Scientific Information.
• It shows its harmony with the ‘Cape Town Declaration for Open Education’.