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Rey Juan Carlos University approved on January 31 a document that makes a clear commitment to open knowledge. This document expresses the institution’s will to integrate, into its activities, institutional policies, and future plans, the creation of an environment that fosters open science and education. To this end, 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, “in which the efforts of the university community are promoted and aligned around the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the ‘2030 Agenda established by the United Nations, especially in the areas of Quality Education (SDG 4) and Research and Innovation (SDG 9),” the declaration states.

This confirms all the steps taken by URJC in its commitment to open knowledge and education. In this regard, Rey Juan Carlos University has been offering several MOOCs on the MiriadaX platform since 2013 and has had 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, URJC has been working for more than a decade in the working groups of the Network of University Libraries (REBIUN). The aim of this work is, among other things, “to enhance institutional research and teaching content and data repositories and to leverage technologies and interoperability to drive new value-added services,” as noted.

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

In addition, URJC has a digitized heritage available on the audiovisual portal TVURJC, which already counts more than 3,800 videos.

All these initiatives have their roots in the free software movement, which, since its origins more than 30 years ago, has developed legal, technical, economic, and philosophical mechanisms that have not only fostered its enormous impact on today’s society but have also laid the foundations for the rest of the open knowledge movements,” the document states. Rey Juan Carlos University has been part of the international community of free software users and producers for many years. Tools such as the Virtual Classroom and the application suite MyApps 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 one more step toward a university community that is an agent of profound change in the ways knowledge is generated, shared, and disseminated in all areas.”

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

• Fully subscribes to the principles stated in the document ‘University Commitments’ to Open Science approved at the General Assembly of the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE).
• Ratifies the commitment expressed in the Consorcio Madroño declaration in support of Open Science to academic and scientific information.
• Adheres to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.
• Expresses its agreement with UNESCO and its Declaration on Free Access to Scientific Information.
• Shows its alignment with the ‘Cape Town Open Education Declaration’.