Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) announced that THE Reference is one of the inaugural winners of theIOI Network Adoption Fund. It was selected from more than 100 applications from 22 countries, and, according to IOI “the proposal was ambitious, disruptive and offers localized solutions to the challenges in the open research ecosystem in Latin America.”

LA Reference will receive funding of USD 1,500,000 over the next two to three years to advance the adoption of open infrastructure and strengthen regional research ecosystems. In addition to funding, IOI staff will provide ongoing support to project teams throughout implementation to support and improve their governance, community engagement, financial and business models, ensuring the long-term resilience and impact of these networks.

The winning project

LA Reference will expand and improve its shared research platform throughout Latin America so that the region’s scientific work can be more easily shared, preserved and discovered globally. LA Reference operates a regional discovery and aggregation platform that currently connects 10 countries and that collects and preserves research information from national repositories in each member country. Key elements of this proposed project include:

  • Expand services to include 10 more Latin American countries, promoting membership and strengthening a more egalitarian and inclusive regional network.
  • Enhance the platform with new capabilities, including:
    • An AI-powered multilingual semantic search system capable of detecting research in different languages and connecting academic work, beyond linguistic barriers, combined with advanced metadata enrichment to enable new metrics and more transparent and diverse research evaluation approaches, across the region.
    • Implement a persistent and decentralized identifier system (dARK) – based on blockchain technology and already operating at IBICT (Brazil) – to ensure that research results and metadata continue to be accessible in a permanent and verifiable manner, even in the event of local failures in the system.
  • Create a regional Dataverse repository for orphan data sets.
  • Expand training programs and translate documentation to help more institutions use Dataverse effectively.

Supported by the generous collaboration of Wellcome, Digital Science, the Kahle Austin Foundation, the Karger Publishers Foundation, Arcadia, EBSCO, and other private donors, the Fund aims to accelerate the global adoption of open data and knowledge-sharing infrastructures, enabling more equitable research and collaborative around the world.

*Article based on information published by Invest In Open Infrastructure