LA Referencia – South American Open Science network

Alberto Cabezas

LA Referencia – South American Open Science network

Alberto Cabezas – Executive Secretary of LA Referencia

(interviewer: Michał Starczewski)

La Referencia is a network of repositories from 9 South American countries. How does it work and what are its aims? Does it have a formal structure?

The initial project was presented by RedCLARA (RedCLARA – Cooperación Latino Americana de Redes Avanzadas – is an international non-profit organization established in 2003, managing the only advanced internet network in Latin America) and funded by the Regional Public Goods program of the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) from 2010 to 2013. The goal was to build a common strategy for a regional federated network of scientific publication repositories.

The second phase of LA Referencia started in January 2014. It has the clear objective of consolidating a self-sustainable regional service, in accordance with national repository strategies. We harvest each national node which in turn collects the country's production. 

The associates are Science and Technology (S&T) organizations from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela; they finance the operation and maintenance of the national nodes. Also, in some countries, they work together with National Research and Education Networks and with University Consortia to perform national harvesting. In this context, RedCLARA offers administrative support and the necessary technical infrastructure. In order to sustain this effort, LA Referencia keeps regular practices and formal mechanisms for decision making among the associates.

The service offered by LA Referencia is a clear expression of the public policy agreements of the science and technology authorities of the countries that signed the agreement to create this initiative in November 2012, in Buenos Aires. The pilot was developed in 2013 and the service was opened at the end of the same year.

The main objective of LA Referencia is to provide open access to the regional scientific production, through a federated network between countries that promotes national strategies for open access repositories.

Some specific objectives are:

• to develop a stable funding structure and stable decision making procedures, and to integrate new partners that share the same principles;

• to make visible and to maximize the use and impact of the scientific production of Latin America;

• to set standards and best practices for preservation, quality, and interoperability in information retrieval;

• to generate projects that will facilitate value adding services, technological upgrading, and public policy articulation.

We believe that regional strategies help to:

• increase the visibility and the access to Latin American scientific production, both on the national and international level;

• mitigate the impact of the high cost of scientific journals in universities and technological and scientific organizations with fewer financial resources;

• promote the development of open access repositories in countries that are at an early stage in this area;

• generate an ample space to consolidate operational agreements and disseminate best practices in different areas (technical, institutional, public policy).

Our activities cover many areas. In short, every week we harvest the national nodes of each country which, in turn, collect the scientific production of that country. In this process we also validate and transform the metadata to improve interoperability at the international level. To improve the results of the regional collaboration, we employ statistical and diagnostic tools that help us to measure quality at different levels.

What has LA Referencia already achieved? What is its biggest success?

Institutional: There are a number of successful projects that stop operating when the grant comes to an end. In the literature this is called the “Valley of Death” in innovation. With efforts from many countries, institutions and people,  LA Referencia is today a self-supporting effort in essential operational terms, with formal mechanisms for decision making.

Innovation and service: Today it is an imperative to offer a viable and recurrent service. During the initial pilot only 3–4 countries were harvested recurrently. Today the reality is completely different. We have grown from 320.000 documents to almost 800.000; and in this process, countries and repositories are clearly improving their metadata quality. However, we still need to make some modifications to this process and to combine growth with quality improvement.

Technology: In 2014 we developed a “national” version of our platform. Our developments are basically located in the so called back-end (harvesting, validation, transformation) and in the statistics module. For the front-end we use the open source software VuFind. The version we use is adaptative (it works fine both for mobiles and tablets) and up to now has been installed in Peru and Ecuador.

What are your plans for the future?

Improving institutionalization, improving the quality of our services and of the information presented, improving the communication of open access strategies and developments in each country – these are all ongoing efforts. However, we see two areas with relevant challenges:

The associates of LA Referencia are national bodies of S&T. We need to agree on metadata standards for project IDs  in order to connect funding information with the scientific results. The majority of R&D in the region is financed with national public funds, so we must make sure that these results are available for all our citizens. This is a collaborative effort supported also by the recent national legislation in Argentina, Perú and México.

In the future, collaboration with relevant initiatives, projects, and organizations to make scientific literature repositories interoperable with data repositories. Especially for the so-called long tail of research data, and ,again, for data financed with public research funds.

Technical standards and metadata are very important for a successful repository network. Did implementation of these standards cause any problems? And if so, how were they solved?

In 2012 our technical group agreed on the strategy to adopt Driver 2 Guidelines in order to implement the pilot. This decision reflected the national realities, rather than being an answer to some problems “per se”. For example, some countries have adopted the guidelines from the very beginning. Others followed a strategy of adapting and updating their own guidelines. In all other cases, we worked country by country, implementing transformations either at the national or at the regional node.

This is an ongoing process. In some countries we continue to introduce transformations, while in others hardly any modifications were necessary. In any case, the chief achievement is that with this approach, national repositories are improving significantly, due to the adoption of common technical standards.

In addition, as I have already said, we have a set of tools for administrators that enables them to monitor the processes of metadata validation and transformation during harvesting; this allows them to identify problems with specific records or institutions.

There are no “silver bullets” for solving technical difficulties. It is a process of ongoing quality monitoring that must combine a general agreed strategy with local conditions.

Can an international network of repositories such as LA Referencia also be a platform for sharing know-how and best practices in scholarly communication between publishers, editors, authors, etc.?

Since we are a technical platform, our focus is to provide a valuable harvesting service and search options, and to improve the quality of the presented information (in many aspects: content, metadata, relevant statistics, etc.).

However, LA Referencia is also a community where we communicate the advances in public policies in the region, we give support to each associate participating in our community, and we discuss the best strategies for achieving our goals. We also participate in international initiatives like COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) and we are constantly analyzing the most appropriate options for training activities for 2015–2016.

Is there any visible increase in scientific cooperation between researchers from LA Referencia member states? Are there tools for measuring such cooperation?

We do not have any specific tools on our platform for measuring cooperation. Usually, the traditional method is to look at joint publications or projects. The first method is used by some of the associates of LA Referencia at the regional or national level, using different sources. Examples include, among others, WoS,  Scopus, SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library On Line), or studies made by SciMAGO in Spain or RICYT in the Latin-American region.

Open repositories are an e-infrastructure for Green Open Access. Is Green OA preferred to Gold OA in the member states of LA Referencia?

I do not think, personally, that the issue is Green vs. Gold as a preferred route in the Latin American context. The main issue is about national strategies to support Open Access in a comprehensive way; these should be aligned with S&T policy.

At the risk of oversimplification, I would say that to me it seems that for some actors in developed countries the debate on Green vs. Gold is formulated as an alternative: either subsidies for Open Access APC charges – as the way to solve visibility or sustain the so-called “viable transition” of business models – or a repository strategy. I think we should explore different alternatives and combinations; we should introduce more complexity, taking national or regional contexts into account; we should evaluate the impact of different variables of each approach. Just to give a small example: in some countries, national repositories for science and innovation are due to the country S&T policy.

The principle is simple: to make scientific results openly available to all citizens, especially in the case of research that was financed by public funds. However, there are no “silver bullets” to achieve this.

In the region, we must remember, there are some countries that strongly support Green Open Access infrastructures and, at the same time, strongly support the edition of national journals in open access with quality standards. Also, we must remember that the majority of journals edited in the region are open access journals which charge either no APCs at all or very small APCs.

In fact, the presence of Open Access in terms of scientific repositories and journals is now very strong in Latin America. Directories like OpenDOAR show this. Also, DOAJ shows a production not reflected in traditional research outputs, in services such as Scopus or WoS. This regional specificity, with an impressive amount of open access results, can be explained by the lack of commercial editors, governmental support, the influence of SciELO, and cultural factors, among others.

A good overview of this situation can be found in the appropriate studies¹.

There is a law on Open Access in Argentina since November 2013. Are there other Open Access policies in the member states or in individual research institutions?

Yes, in 2013 a national legislation was passed in Peru. And in 2014, in Mexico. It is a unique development because these are national legislations, not instituted by specific research councils or funds. There are also important universities implementing open mandates.

This year we will probably see the passing of a national legislation in still another country. The important point is that it seems that there is a special development in our region: it is governments that decide to adopt explicit open access policies (see: Mexico, Peru, Argentina).

How many publications are accessible under open licenses, i.e. CC BY? How popular is libre OA in South America?

It is difficult to give an exact figure. But we are quite sure that this is a region with a relatively high proportion of Open Access journals compared with other continents. I will quote a study by Juan Pablo Alperin: “Estimates on the extent of OA in developing regions vary significantly. In Latin America, these estimates range from a low 51% of all online journals being OA to a high 95% depending on the source of the data used. In the Scopus database, 74% of all Latin American journals are OA, compared with the global total of 9% (Miguel et al., 2011)”. After discussing other studies, Alperin  concludes, “But, even these varied estimates suggest much higher levels of OA participation than other regions of the world, especially in Latin America, at least in comparison to the global totals in the studies cited above and to other global estimates of OA, which are estimated around 20% (Laakso & Björk, 2012; Laakso et al., 2011)”.

The use of CC licenses is well established in scientific journals in the region.

Open Access is, in essence, a global model. Do you follow the development of the European Open Access infrastructure, e.g. OpenAIRE? Are LA Referencia solutions compatible with it?

We follow its development and we believe that we must have standards for global interoperability. Driver 2 was a huge step and decision. Now we are analyzing the OpenAIRE 3.0 Guidelines for Literature Repositories  which represent an evolution of the Driver Guidelines. We will actually be part of the OpenAIRE2020 project. We will take part in one of the work packages – the one oriented towards the alignment of international repository networks. In the next two years we will have a special focus on analyzing and adopting some aspects of the OpenAIRE Guidelines, in order to increase interoperability at a global level.

^1. Chinchilla-Rodríguez, Zaida, Sandra Miguel and Félix Moya-Anegón, Influencia del acceso abierto en las revistas de América Latina en el contexto internacional de la ciencia.In Bibliotecas y Repositorios Digitales: Gestión del conocimiento, Acceso Abierto y Visibilidad Latinoamericana, Bogotá (Colombia), Mayo 9 al 11 de 2011, SCImago Research Group 2011, http://publicaciones.renata.edu.co/index.php/RCEC/article/download/93/pdf.

Babini Dominique, Scientific Output from Latin America and the Caribbean – Identification of the Main Institutions for Regional Open Access Integration Strategies, 2012 [Report], http://eprints.rclis.org/19085/.

Alperin, Juan Pablo, Open Access Indicators. Assessing Growth and Use of Open Access Resources from Developing Regions. The Case of Latin America (pp. 15–82). In Alperin, J.P.; Babini, D; Fischman, G. (Eds.), Open Access Indicators and Scholarly Communications in Latin America, 1a ed. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: CLACSO; Buenos Aires: Unesco, 2014.E-Book, http://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/clacso/se/20140917054406/OpenAccess.pdf.

This material is under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Szczegóły

Opublikowano: 2015-03-11