LA Referencia, through its services, supports national Open Science strategies in Latin America and Spain. 
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CONSENSUSED STRATEGIES IN POLICIES AND SERVICES

There is a set of common policies for the Federated Network that are updated over time and respond to agreements from partner countries. These cover political, organizational and technical components that formed the basis of the project and that are a framework for the service and the deepening of interoperability actions. Also in this chapter are added the key projects and alliances that LA Referencia carries.

Representatives of LA Referencia member countries signed an Open Access Declaration in Mexico as a regional commitment to promote the principles outlined in the Berlin Declaration. The Act, signed in October 2011, aims to promote access to scientific and academic information through the provision of a Federated Network. An agreement was also signed to promote regional policies and encourage Open Access.

Read Acuerdo de Acceso Abierto
Read Acuerdo de Promoción y Políticas
Read Declaración de Berlín

High authorities representing the countries which are members of LA Referencia signed an agreement of political support for the development of regional strategies in the subject of Open Access. The agreement, signed in Buenos Aires in 2012, reflects the regional political will to facilitate equitable access to information derived from Latin American scientific production as a regional public good with an emphasis on publicly funded results. The Buenos Aires Act specifies the regional interest in creating the pilot experience of the Latin American Federated Network of Scientific Documentation Repositories, which establishes a country node strategy and the type of materials to be harvested and also defines an institutional framework.

Read Acuerdo de Cooperación Regional

In August 2012 the countries signed a technical agreement, based on the collaboration of the national networks for the inclusion of the relevant digital objects in the implementation of the pilot plan, that ended in December 2013. To these ends, it was agreed to adopt the Driver 2.0 normative for the progressive standardization of the metadata that integrates the various national repositories and maintain a node-country strategy. For the period 2014-2016 the work plan contemplated analyzing and adapting the OpenAire Guidelines, recognized as the continuity of Driver, in order to create an interoperable infrastructure of repositories on a global scale.

Read Acuerdo Técnico (2012)
Read Directrices DRIVER 2.0  
Read Directrices OpenAIRE 3.0 para repositorios de literatura   
Read Directrices LA Referencia (2015) - Metadatos y Políticas de Cosecha
Read Calidad de información - Aspectos técnicos y operativos

At present, the tendency from the S&T organizations to promote Open Science represents new challenges for LA Referencia and its member countries. This document recovers the concept of Open Science, details the benefits for researchers and access to knowledge, characterizes the region and poses a series of challenges and proposals to focus on.

Read LA Referencia. Policies for Open Science and Scientific Data in Latin America
ReadPublic Goods for Scientific Data Policies in Latin America

Cooperation and administration agreement between RedCLARA and LA Referencia (2018)

By signing in December 2018, the technological and administrative cooperation agreement reinforces the actions that RedCLARA and LA Referencia have been carrying out in Latin America to favor open access to academic productions.

Read Cooperation and Administration Agreement between RedClara and LA Reference (December 2018).

The agreement was aimed at promoting common actions in Open Science and facilitating the use of Zenodo as a repository of scientific data for researchers and institutions in Latin America.


Read Agreement between LA Referencia and CERN Zenodo

Held in order to promote access to scientific knowledge, implement mechanisms of technological cooperation and facilitate the use and collaborative development of the LA Referencia Software.

Read Press release: Cooperation Agreement between FCT of Portugal and LA Referencia.
Read Cooperation agreement between LA Reference and the FCT

The objective of the association is to support the adoption and commitment to vital technologies and open source programs, supported by the community, designed to manage academic communication, data sharing and digital repositories.

Read Agreement LA Referencia and Lyrasis
Read note Lyrasis and LA Referencia announce a new cooperation agreement.

The document describes the current model of academic communication and the challenges it faces to achieve a better balance between the commercial and non-commercial world, among other aspects. It reinforces that decisive actions must be taken so that the results financed totally or partially with public funds are in Open Access and reaffirms the central role of the CyT organizations to achieve it. Based on regional reality, it proposes general principles and actions for Open Access repositories, consortiums and magazines with a more systemic view from public policies.

Read Academic Communication and Open Access. Actions for a Public Policy in Latin America (May - 2019)
Read versions of the document in Spanish and English from Zenodo.

The Executive Secretariat designs and executes annual work plans approved by the Directing Council. The document includes chapters such as Service Description, Strategic Analysis, Functional Plans, budget, among others. The central agreements of the Council, in relation to the work plan and strategic orientations, are held at an annual meeting where an act is published.

Read Brazil Act (2015). Workshop LA Referencia/Coar/OpenAIRE
Read México Act (2016)
Read Buenos Aires Act (2017)
Read Santiago de Chile Act (2018)
Read Costa Rica Act (2019)

The Executive Secretariat designs and executes annual work plans approved by the Directing Council. The document includes chapters such as Service Description, Strategic Analysis, Functional Plans, budget, among others. The central agreements of the Council, in relation to the work plan and strategic orientations, are held at an annual meeting where an act is published. Read Agreement of procedure for the entry of member countries to LA Referencia.

LATIN AMERICA IS INTEROPERABLE WITH INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS FOR OPEN ACCESS

LA Referencia, through its document "Metadata and Harvest Policies" (2015), establishes a series of interoperability guidelines whose fulfillment must be guaranteed by the national nodes while recommending its adoption by the repositories that make up the network. The guidelines, agreed at the regional level, are based on the Driver 2.0 Guidelines and the OpenAIRE Guidelines for Literature Repository Managers 3, adopted by the European Union. Its compliance determine if a record is accepted or rejected by LA Referencia at the harvest stage.

In November 2018, the new version of the Guidelines 4.0 was published where the LA Referencia technical team collaborated and were approved by the Board of Directors of the same at the end of 2018. Its implementation will be gradual as of 2020.


 

BACKGROUND

The antecedents date from the Act of Agreement of the Meeting in Bogotá (May 12 and 13, 2011) where the adhesion of the Network was established to the DRIVER 2.0 guidelines. In August 2012, the Technical Group of representatives of the partner countries defined the specific methods and techniques for the implementation of the pilot based on 10 Driver fields. http://www.lareferencia.info/joomla/recursos/documentos/acuerdos-tecnicos/17-aspectos-tecnicos

The Driver guidelines date back to 2008. In 2012 it was merged with OpenAIRE which is in charge of maintaining it (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe). The current version is OpenAIRE Guidelines for Literature Repository Managers 3, April 2013, which defines the core elements of interoperability.

Broadly speaking, OpenAIRE is the natural evolution of Driver and places greater emphasis on identifying the sources of financing for open access production, as well as complement Driver with guidelines for data repositories and CRIS (Current Research Information Systems). From another angle, it is the infrastructure that underpins the Horizon 2020 program of the European Community in terms of Open Access to information 

https://guidelines.openaire.eu/en/latest/index.html 

Finally, globally, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has worked on the construction of a series of multilingual controlled vocabularies, to achieve greater international alignment of vocabularies and elements of the guidelines in order to ensure interoperability. The Reference participates in the COAR Controlled Vocabularies Working Group . Currently, at the moment, the Controlled Vocabularies available are those of resource type, version and access mode.


The document “Metadata and harvest policies "(2015) establishes the obligatory nature, definition and scope of each of the 14 elements of the Dublin Core metadata scheme contemplated. In addition, specific instructions are provided for registration and the cases are indicated in that the controlled vocabularies established for type of publication, version and level of access should be used.

OpenAIRE published a new version of its OpenAIRE Guidelines for Literature Repository Managers. (V. 4.0). The Reference participated in its development and will gradually support through training and technical support the transition of the repositories of the region towards this new guideline with the purpose of consolidating repositories with greater wealth of metadata and guaranteeing its international interoperability.

 

GET TO KNOW THE DIFFERENT PHASES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF LA REFERENCIA

LA Referencia was born as a project coordinated by the Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks (RedCLARA) and financed by the Public Goods Fund of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) between 2010 and 2013. It counted with the participation of Science and Technology institutions and part of the NRENs of the region.

Initially, it was oriented towards agreements and policies related to federated access, common policies, standards for interoperability and a technology pilot.

LA Referencia, in this context, is born from the Cooperation Agreement, signed in Buenos Aires in 2012, which reflects the political will to offer, in open access, the scientific production of Latin America as a regional public good with emphasis on the results financed with Public funds.

At the end of the project, in 2013, the network is articulated as a service between the S&T bodies of the region with the support of RedCLARA, with the objective of consolidating an open access strategy for access to scientific publications, based on National repositories policies and the generation of public goods.

To access the full story of the creation of LA Referencia, please visit our old website.

IADB Project Information at RedCLARA

Project Information at the IADB

OUR CONTRIBUTION ON THE ROAD TOWARDS OPEN ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE

We are an organization that underpins an open access strategy for Latin America in order to make visible its scientific production, based on institutional repositories under the model of a federated network.

A network of collaboration and articulation in the field of public policies for open access and open science among the main national organisms of Science and Technology, together with a technical network of support to the national strategies and tasks of each country.

We promote the promotion of public goods and economies of scale by agreeing, for example, interoperable common guidelines, participating in their evolution and development; open source transferable technologies; common developments that offer added value and training actions.

We generate alliances with international actors in the fields of action of LA Reference addressing various axes of action such as interoperability with OpenAIRE (European Open Science platform); common indexing in major global search engines; participation in COAR; specific agreements with initiatives such as Zenodo del Cern for scientific data, among others.

 

VALUE PROPOSAL

It derives mainly from two sources. The tradition of public goods and benefits that are the result of coordinated action. As for example we can cite:


AGREEMENTS

  • Generation of visions and joint strategies at regional level on the organizational model, annual work priorities and vision for future challenges from Latin America for repositories, open science and academic communication.
  • Identification of key alliances to support open access and strengthen a regional system connected to international initiatives. For example, participation in COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) and OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe towards 2020). 
  • Understanding agreements with institutions that consolidate institutional objectives such as RedCLARA for collaboration with Nrens and network management; with FCT of Portugal for joint technological developments and production visibility; with Zenodo for scientific data.
  • Services that the private sector cannot offer given its high degree of uncertainty or lack of a market that allows the appropriation of benefits. It is also the role of CyT organizations to offer free information on science technology and innovation generated totally or partially with public funds.

TECHNOLOGY AND SERVICES

  • Open source, transferable technological development that allows savings in development, updating and support for each partner. Likewise, identification of common roadmaps that facilitate collaborative development according to the needs of the countries. 
  • Prioritization of non-proprietary standards and development architecture that prevents dependence on proprietary or unique solutions (for example, at the level of persistent identifiers or technological components). 
  • Services that represent economies of scale and can be transferred (for example, value-added services, distributed statistics, joint proof of concept to determine the viability of a product).
  • Visibility when indexing the production of each country collaboratively in other search engines and information retrieval systems.


GUIDELINES

  • Common rules that represent consensual guidelines for cataloging information and interoperability with the standards used in other regions such as Europe in order to have common infrastructure. 
  • Regional participation in the evolution of these guidelines (OpenAIRE) and in the development of associated recommendations such as controlled vocabularies (Coar) or scientific data (Datacite)


TRAINING AND COMMUNICATION

  • Webinars for national nodes in technical matters such as platforms and guidelines.
  • Dissemination of the activities of the associates.
  • Development and dissemination of training content and documents.
     

In addition, the countries that make up the Reference participate in COAR and through RedCLARA, collaborate in the OpenAIRE 2020 project (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe towards 2020), funded by the European Commission. READ MORE

There is no translation available.

 
 
 

"AN ARTICULATION OF POLICIES AND ACTIONS IN OPEN SCIENCE, IN ORDER TO CREATE AN ECOSYSTEM OF OPEN SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION IN THE REGION AS PUBLIC GOOD, LED BY THE ORGANISMS OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY."

OUR NODES

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OUR PARTNERS

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