Meeting of La Referencia Directive Council: OpenAIRE, La Referencia and COAR discussed ongoing collaboration and their strengthening in 2018

On September 27 to 29 the Directive Council of La Referencia, the regional repository network from Latin America, met in Buenos Aires, Argentina. La Referencia was created five years ago and currently brings together nine national nodes and aggregates almost 1,5 million documents.

The meeting, with representatives from Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, Colombia, Argentina and Costa Rica confirmed the broadening of the focus of La Referencia from open access to open science, discussed the priorities and work plans for 2018 and analyzed the evolution of the situation on the region, namely the conclusions from the First Consortium Assembly from Ibero-America and the Caribbean held on August 31 and September 1, 2017, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and the Declaration from the meeting, expressing criticism and reservation to an APC based transition to Open Access and calling for reinforcement of regional collaboration.

The international collaboration was the topic of the last day of the meeting, with the participation of Eloy Rodrigues, from University of Minho, member of OpenAIRE Steering Committee and President of COAR, and Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director of COAR. In that occasion, the progress and challenges of the current work of alignment repositories at the global level lead by COAR, and the collaboration between OpenAIRE and La Referencia, especially the development of OpenAIRE Guidelines 4.0, were analyzed. The continuation, consolidation and strengthening of the alignment between OpenAIRE and La Referencia was also discussed and it was agreed to  advance in the interoperation and technical integration through joint training, further development of guidelines and the use of the OpenAIRE Analytics (usage statistics) and Broker services by La Referencia.