Federated
Regional cooperation strengthens national systems without replacing them with a centralized model.
Federated open science infrastructure
LA Referencia IOIExpanding and innovating federated open science infrastructure in Latin America
LA Referencia is advancing a new phase of its public infrastructure to expand regional coverage, overcome discovery barriers, strengthen persistent identification and provide new capabilities for research data.
A 2026–2028 project supported by Invest in Open Infrastructure.
What is LA Referencia?
LA Referencia, an open science network.
LA Referencia brings together countries in Latin America and Spain to ensure that publicly funded knowledge is accessible, visible and preserved.
The project turns this policy vision into shared infrastructure, concrete services and sustainable capacities, while respecting the autonomy of national nodes.
Public and non-commercial
The infrastructure is conceived as a public good serving science and society.
Open and sovereign
Open standards, shared knowledge and regional control reduce dependencies and broaden participation.
A vision for the next decade
Ten years of cooperation. Six priorities for the next ten.
On LA Referencia’s tenth anniversary, its Governing Council defined the strategic priorities that would guide the network’s development over the following decade.
The LA Referencia IOI project responds to that mandate by turning these priorities into regional expansion, shared services, open infrastructure and concrete capacities.
Full political representation
Bring every country in the region into the network and its governance.
Project responseExpands coverage to countries not yet integrated, creates aggregation mechanisms for new sources and supports their political and operational participation.
Policy alignment
Align regional capacities with national open science policies.
Project responseConnects national nodes and institutions through federated models for operation, support, training and the adoption of common standards.
Interoperability and cooperation
Strengthen technical connections with other systems and global ecosystems.
Project responseNormalizes metadata, integrates open identifiers and connects aggregation, dARK, DSpace and Dataverse through interoperable standards and services.
Language equity
Promote multilingualism and the visibility of knowledge produced in the region’s languages.
Project responseDevelops multilingual semantic search and metadata enrichment to discover content by meaning, beyond literal word matching.
Infrastructure as a public good
Strengthen open, non-commercial and resilient systems under regional governance.
Project responseDeploys shared services for aggregation, persistent identification and research data, supported by open technologies and distributed capacities.
Responsible metrics
Promote more representative indicators aligned with open science principles.
Project responseImproves metadata coverage, quality, affiliations and identifiers, creating a stronger regional foundation for developing responsible metrics.
From vision to action
The project connects policy, technology and capacities.
Integrate more countries, institutions, repositories, journals and data sources into the regional collection.
Incorporate multilingual semantic search, metadata enrichment, persistent identification and decentralized metadata preservation.
Build sustainable infrastructure and services for governments in the region, supported by regional capacities for operation, support and knowledge transfer.
How it is organized
Three components, one ecosystem.
Each component addresses a distinct need. Their full value emerges when data, metadata, identifiers and capacities are reconnected within the regional infrastructure.
A
Visibility and coverage
A broader and more diverse regional collection, with higher-quality metadata and greater global visibility.
Extends coverage to new sources and countries, improves and normalizes metadata, and enables discovery of the region’s research outputs through a multilingual semantic search engine.
- Regional expansion
- Metadata quality
- Multilingual visibility
B
Identification and sovereignty
ARK identifiers and persistent metadata supported by decentralized infrastructure.
Develops sovereign, sustainable regional infrastructure governed as a public good, with no assignment costs for institutions and no dependence on a central commercial entity.
- dARK 2.0
- Metadata preservation
- Regional public good
C
Data and capacities
Shared regional infrastructure and knowledge for curating, managing and publishing research data.
Builds a regional repository based on Dataverse and shares support, documentation, training and curation practices to strengthen capacities across the region.
- Regional Dataverse
- Federated support
- Shared knowledge
How the components relate
An open infrastructure cycle
- A
Harvests and improves metadata for research outputs and makes it visible regionally and globally to users in different languages.
- B
Persistently identifies and preserves that metadata through ARK identifiers and decentralized infrastructure.
- C
Creates a regional repository and shared capacities; its data and metadata are incorporated into Component A’s aggregation and Component B’s identification and preservation services.
The project team
A regional team for shared infrastructure.
Thirteen people bring together expertise in project direction, architecture, development, metadata, artificial intelligence, persistent identifiers, research data, support, infrastructure, design and training.
Meet the full team13members
of a regional team
of a regional team
People with complementary profiles work in an integrated, cross-cutting manner across Components A, B and C.
Project direction and architecture
Software and artificial intelligence
Metadata and interoperability
dARK and preservation
Dataverse and curation
Support, infrastructure and UX
Results and progress · January–July 2026
Project results to date.
This section presents the project’s results to date: progress reports, demonstration sites and infographics documenting the work completed across the three components. Each item describes its scope, current status and next steps.
ReportsProgress, implementations and lessons learned during the period.
Demo sitesDemonstrations of services, pilots and resources under development.
InfographicsVisual summaries of the project’s results, scope and evolution.
Latest update
Publication status for each product, the team presentation and a guide to reports, evidence and materials in progress were added.