COLLABORATING FOR OPEN ACCESS WORLDWIDE

LA Referencia is part of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) and through RedCLARA they collaborate with the OpenAIRE Project.

OpenAIRE, is a project funded by the European Union under the Horizon2020 program. It is an Open Access Research Infrastructure, based on the network of open access repositories. Today, OpenAIRE's mission is to "Shift scholarly communication towards openness and transparency and facilitate innovative ways to communicate and monitor research".   It is done through aligning policies, providing services for open science, linking to research and its data with its creators, monitor Open Science; work to develop it and build global bridges, driving open innovation for academic communication.

"OpenAIRE’s mission is closely linked to the mission of the European Commission: to provide unlimited, barrier free, open access to research outputs financed by public funding in Europe."

COAR is an international association with more than 140 members and partners from around the world, representing libraries, universities, research institutions, government funders and others. COAR brings together the repositories community and the main repositories networks to build capacity, align policies and practices, and act as a global voice for the repositories community.

To date, RedCLARA /  LA Referencia has participated with COAR in two OpenAIRE projects: OpenAIRE Advance, which ends 2020, and OpenAIRE 2020, completed in 2018.

 

OpenAIRE-Advance 

 

"OpenAIRE-Advance continues the mission of OpenAIRE to support the Open Access/Open Data mandates in Europe. By sustaining the current successful infrastructure, comprised of a human network and robust technical services, it consolidates its achievements while working to shift the momentum among its communities to Open Science, aiming to be a trusted e-Infrastructure within the realms of the European Open Science Cloud.In this next phase, OpenAIRE-Advance strives to empower its National Open Access Desks (NOADs) so they become a pivotal part within their own national data infrastructures, positioning OA and open science onto national agendas."

 

Work Package 5: “Global OA Scholarly Communication Infrastructure”. 

This component is lead by COAR.

The actions consist of promoting greater global alignment of open scientific infrastructure, supporting a deeper participation of OpenAIRE in other networks and strengthening the capacity of institutions around the world to support Open Science. This implies working with other regional and national networks to adopt common standards, exchange and improve metadata and collaboratively develop common services.

This international package is much larger than the previous one and includes actions with Canada, Japan, the United States, Africa, among other countries.

Examples:

  • Pilot projects with self-funded countries.
  • Launch a network of repositories in Africa.
  • Global alignment of repository networks.
  • Capacity development for repositories networks and repositories administrators.



Tasks for Latin America (LA Referencia / RedCLARA)

They are included in task 5.2. (Consolidating the alignment of networks between Europe and Latin America)

Some aspects are:

  • Implementation of services in Latin America that will expand and strengthen OA infrastructure worldwide, ensuring that other regions are aligned and progress in the same direction as Europe. This will contribute to long-term sustainability, create stronger ties with other countries and regions, and allow for more fluid data exchange and value-added services.
  • Alignment of the two regions through the transfer of technologies, services and practices from the EU to Latin America. LA Referencia will act as the first pilot outside Europe for various services and practices developed by OpenAIRE.

SPECIFIC TASKS:

  • Consolidation of the alignment of repositories networks between Europe and Latin America in terms of guidelines and adaptation of OpenAIRE training material for Latin America.

  • Conducting a training workshop in Latin America, in order to support the adoption of greater functionalities of aggregation services in the region.

  • Implementation of common methods for usage statistics in Europe and Latin America. The pilot will be based on the installation and adoption of the OpenAIRE usage statistics analysis package in the Latin American repositories network. By following the common standards of cleanliness and reports (COUNTER), as well as the supply and recovery (SUSHI) of usage statistics, this will improve interoperability between common statistics.

  • A version of the "Broker" Service that can support national aggregators where LA Referencia will act as a use case to extend to other services.


DELIVERABLE AND MILESTONES

  • Pilot of usage statistics with a representative sample of repositories in Latin America.

  • Plan for the adoption of usage statistics in Latin America.

  • Training course in Latin America.

  • Pilot aggregator as a service (Canada) and broker as a service (Latin America).

    .

OpenAIRE2020 represented a fundamental phase in the long-term effort to implement and strengthen the impact of EU Open Access policies based on the achievements of OpenAIRE projects.

 “OpenAIRE2020 was conceived to help implement and monitor these activities by promoting open scholarship and substantially improving the discoverability and reusability of research publications and data. The initiative brings together professionals from 50 institutions all over Europe, including research libraries, open scholarship organisations, national e-Infrastructure and data experts, as well as, IT and legal researchers.”

The project also aimed to expand the adoption in Latin America of guidelines developed by OpenAIRE to demonstrate the feasibility of interoperability of repositories. Specifically, one of the objectives, number 3, aimed at creating an international OA repository collaboration platform to support research and academic communication.


Work Package 3: International Alignment

This component, led by COAR, had as its main objectives:

  • Align the networks of regional repositories (geographic or thematic) and take advantage of the work already done by COAR in order to accelerate interoperability, facilitating the exchange of good practices and the adoption of shared indicators, services and technologies.

     

  • Global alignment of the networks. Task focused on regional networks of repositories to create an infrastructure that can be connected across geographical boundaries. The alignment helps avoid regional silos and supports the global interoperability of open access electronic infrastructures. While regional diversity is important, there are several common approaches that could be taken to facilitate the exchange of data between repositories and the development of global value-added services. These include the harmonization of some policy elements and the adoption of standardized impact measures, publication monitoring methods, metadata elements, vocabularies, researcher identifications, among others.


Tasks for Latin America 

In relation to the region LA Referencia and RedCLARA had a key role in task 3.3 (Pilot) showing global interoperability.

Some of its objectives were:

  • Seek to expand the adoption of guidelines developed through OpenAIRE in Latin America to demonstrate the viability of interoperability of repositories.

  • The use of common patterns and technologies in both Latin America and Europe, two major regions, would promote greater adoption in other regions and generate momentum for global alignment.

 

SPECIFIC TASKS

  • Evaluation of the adoption status of the DRIVER and OpenAIRE Guidelines in Latin America.

  • Identification of the main implementation barriers.

  • Promotion of guidelines in the region through a training workshop.

  • Application of a roadmap that describes the strategy for implementation in different countries.

DELIVERABLES

  • Current status report and roadmap for the implementation of guidelines in Latin America.

  • Final report on the status of implementation in Latin America.

KEY RESULTS

  • The main objectives of the pilot were achieved and new actions developed beyond the project 
     
  • The nine national nodes of LA Referencia are interoperable with the OpenAIRE Guidelines and are indexed on the European platform.

  • At the political level there is a greater recognition of the role of LA Referencia in Open Access.

  • LA Referencia participates in the development and evolution of the guidelines and vocabularies of OpenAIRE.


DOCUMENTOS

Read OpenAIRE 2020 Final overall progress report (2018)
Read Informe final LA Referencia y OpenAIRE (2017). Read also from OpenAIRE
Read Final report of implementation status in Latin America
Read La hoja de ruta se denomina "Report of current state and roadmap for implementation of guidelines in Latin America" (2016).
Read 
Promotional Workshop/Consultation for Latin-American RegioN (2016)


NOTICIAS DE INTERÉS

LA Referencia present at the OpenAIRE Technical Meeting - Pisa 2019
Introducing the new OpenAIRE guidelines for Literature Repositories (2019)
Uniting communities for global and open knowledge (2019)
OpenAIRE Guidelines and application profile for repositories administrators and publishing platforms 4.0 (2018)
After meeting in Rio, LA Referencia, OpenAIRE and COAR reaffirm their support for a shared vision of a global network of repositories (2016)
Europe and Latin America expand their collaboration for open science (2016)
LA Referencia adopted the OpenAIRE Guidelines (2015)