From Central America comes good news for the whole community of open access repositories in Latin America. It was officially launched last March 8th, at the University of Costa Rica (UCR), the Costa Rican National Repository, called Kímuk, a tool promoted by the National Council of Rectors (CONARE) and supported by LA Referencia, which aims to provide online access to the academic and scientific production in that country.
In its first stage, the Costa Rican repository gathers four state universities that are responsible for 70% of the academic and scientific production in the country. Kímuk, indigenous word that means cooperation, has 32.480 documents including articles, theses and reports. The goal, now, is to add other institutional repositories to further strengthen the platform.
For M.Sc. Saray Córdoba Gonzalez, representative of the UCR in the Subcommittee for the Improvement of Scientific Journals and Repositories of Costa Rican public universities of CONARE, and one of the promoters of the project, the participation of researchers is as important as the inclusion of repositories of other institutions. “It is essential that each researcher send a copy of their work to their institutional repository; both to reflect their work at the national level through the Kímuk as well as to facilitate the integration of this information into other services in development, such as the national register of researchers and the resumes generated at the institutional level.”
Meanwhile, Alberto Cabezas, executive secretary of LA Referencia, considered this step of Costa Rica as very important because it means advancing the regional cooperation in order to give visibility to the scientific production of the region. “It shows results of technology transfer and cooperation, following the interoperability agreements that this network has adopted, which derive from the OpenAIRE guidelines. This allows us to build a platform of repositories between Latin America and Europe to support free access to research results. “
Currently, Costa Rica has the status of observer in the regional network and its entry is expected to be formalized in 2016. To reach it, “CONARE member universities have created the conditions of technological infrastructure, providing the qualified human resources and intellectual efforts that characterize them, to offer them to the country with interest in contributing to the development of national research”, concludes Saray Córdoba.
As noted in the site, each institution undertakes to adapt the configuration of their institutional repository “so that it is consistent with the guidelines of the National Repository, Kímuk, which are based on the OpenAIRE guidelines for literature repositories” and the recommendations of LA Referencia.
This text was originally published on: http://lareferencia.redclara.net/rfr/noticias/costa-rica-launches-national-open-access-repository
