We would like to give you an update about meetings that COAR Executive Director, Kathleen Shearer attended two weeks ago in Santiago, Chile.

The meetings were organized by LA Referencia and the Licensing Consortia from Latin America and the Caribbean.

The meetings offered an opportunity to share information about the financial and licensing issues related to the big deals, and also the challenges for these countries that would arise with a potential flip to APCs. In Latin America, where they already have significant government investments in their local journal infrastructure (especially through the SciELO and Redalyc platforms), they are firm in their support for repositories as the preferred road for open access to articles published in the large commercial journals.

It was highlighted that access to underlying research data has become increasingly important in the Latin American context, and some countries already have laws requiring that research data be made available. To
increase capacity for RDM in Latin America, LA Referencia and CERN signed an MOU to facilitate the use of the Zenodo repository for Latin American researchers and institutions. The agreement is the result of joint work that LA Referencia has been undertaking with COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) and OpenAIRE, the European Open Science Platform, to internationalise research infrastructures and ensure alignment across regions.

We agreed on several areas in which COAR and La Referencia could collaborate more closely:

  • Promoting the role of repositories and the next generation repository vision in Latin America
  • Working together on increasing expertise and building capacity for repositories
  • Improving communications between our two organizations

And last but not least, we would like to congratulate COAR Executive Board member, Bianca Amaro (IBICT, Brazil) who was elected President of LA Referencia for the next two years. We look forward to continuing to work closely with Bianca, Alberto Cabezas and all the other members and staff of LA Referencia.