Overview
Duration: Ongoing
Team: Katherine Skinner, Kaitlin Thaney, Lauren Collister, Madelyn Waterbury
Funders: Wellcome, Digital Science, Arcadia, Karger Publishers Foundation, Kahle Austin Foundation, EBSCO, Lyrasis
Skillset: Business Development Advisory, Capacity Building, Collective Funding
Latin America has built one of the most successful federated open science networks in the world. LA Referencia's aggregation and discovery platform connects national repositories across Latin America and Spain, making research from more than 500 institutions easier to share, preserve, and discover. It's a model of what regional coordination can accomplish, and the region is ready to take it further.
LA Referencia's proposal to the IOI Fund for Network Adoption stood out from more than 100 applications across 22 countries for the scale of its ambition, its track record of effective delivery, and its clear vision for the future.
What the project will do
LA Referencia will extend its platform to an additional 10 Latin American countries, creating a more inclusive and equitable regional network and bringing national science agencies and their repositories into a shared infrastructure.
The platform itself is getting a major upgrade. An AI-powered multilingual semantic search system will help researchers discover and connect work across languages, supported by metadata enrichment that opens the door to new metrics and more transparent approaches to research assessment throughout the region. The project will publish close to 6 million enriched metadata records through this system.
Underneath it all, LA Referencia is building a decentralized persistent identifier system and long-term metadata preservation based on blockchain technology and already running at IBICT in Brazil. A regional Dataverse repository for orphan datasets, along with expanded training and translated documentation, rounds out the work.
Where IOI comes in
Infrastructure at this scale thrives on more than good engineering. It needs a story the world can hear, a business model built to last, and connections to the people who can help it grow. That's where our support is focused.
We're helping LA Referencia organize and amplify its communications so the project's progress reaches funders, institutions, and peer networks across Latin America and beyond. We're also providing project monitoring to support a shared picture of what's working and where momentum is building.
Alongside that day-to-day work, we're researching the strategic questions that will shape the platform's future, including licensing models and business model options for the long term, and connecting LA Referencia with other projects and partners across our network.
What’s next?
By the end of the project, LA Referencia's platform will reach further than ever before, with a multilingual discovery layer that helps researchers find work unbound by linguistic barriers and a decentralized preservation network that keeps research outputs permanently accessible and verifiable. Technical capacity grows right along with it.
The larger outcome is strengthened digital sovereignty for Latin America: research infrastructure that the region's own institutions build, govern, and sustain, with scholarship in Spanish and Portuguese as discoverable as work published anywhere else in the world.
Have a vision for your region?
Some of the most exciting open infrastructure work happens when institutions pool their strengths across borders. If your network has an ambitious idea and needs the funding, business planning, or connections to bring it to life, we want to hear about it. Get in touch to learn how IOI's Coordinated Funding efforts pair investment with hands-on support.
