COAR member LA Referencia, the Latin America Open Access Repositories network, adopts major elements of OpenAIRE Guidelines to improve global interoperability. LA Referencia is an initiative of public science and technology organizations of nine countries that offers a regional Open Access repository harvesting service.
In 2012, LA Referencia chose to adopt Driver 2.0 guidelines and implementation mechanisms were agreed in mid-2012 for ten fields. Nearly three years later, the new LA Referencia guidelines (Interoperable Metadata and Harvest Policies for La Referencia National Nodes) present and update the fields in a more detailed format, and provide recommendations for all the fields present in Driver. They also offer clarifications and changes derived from OpenAIRE (which currently maintains the guidelines) and define the main areas to work in future releases.
This effort began in mid-2014 as part of the work plan of LA Referencia, through RedCLARA, in the project OpenAIRE2020. Launched in 2015, one of its objectives is to “create an international OA repository network to support global research and scholarly communication”. Part of the OpenAIRE2020 work package led by COAR, the aim is “to accelerate current activities in the area of interoperability by promoting alignment, and facilitating the exchange of good practices and the adoption of shared indicators, services and technologies across regional networks”.
The main audience of the guidelines document are the eight national nodes in La Referencia. It is probable that some of these alignments (depending on the field) will be reached at the level of transformation in the node of La Referencia and in the national node. At the same time, it presents a roadmap for the regional repositories to become interoperable internationally, while, allowing for the details and progress of implementation to be determined at the national level.
Central elements
The biggest change, with full consensus among the representatives of LA Referencia, is to make mandatory the “Rights” (dc: rights) field. It means that every document harvested by LA Referencia should contain an explicit statement of access status based on the international vocabulary and our tradition in this area, and only articles assigned with either openAccess or embargoedAccess will be harvested by LA Referencia. With regard to the licenses, the use of Creative Commons will be recommended.
- openAccess (Open Access): Access without restrictions
- embargoedAccess (embargoed): The resource is restricted until is released in open access on a certain date
The other fields, where applicable, that were agreed to are:
- The fields Description, Subject, Language and Publisher will be changed from Recommended to Mandatory, if applicable.
- The field Contributor will be included as recommended and the director or supervisor of a Thesis, will be mandatory, if applicable.
- Relation, Coverage and Audience are Optional (As well as in Driver 2 and OpenAIRE).
- And, the dc field: format will be recommended.
The following document presents an executive summary of the changes in Spanish:
For illustrative purposes, it has an English version in which the Driver guidelines, OpenAIRE and LA Referencia Guidelines are compared:
Finally, the complete PDF document can be found below:
