LA Referencia strengthens the coverage provided by its members’ national systems and, through the IOI project, creates a pathway to identify, assess and prepare repositories in countries that are not yet part of the network.
Strategy for non-member countries
LA Referencia works with the people and organizations that understand and sustain each country’s research infrastructure. The goal is not merely to locate repositories: it is to build relationships, capacities and technical mechanisms that can bring their outputs into the regional collection while drawing their national organizations closer to the network.
Collaboration with repository managers, universities, and science and technology organizations helps identify institutions and sources, validate contacts, and understand each country’s technical and institutional conditions.
After assessing OAI-PMH and metadata quality, LA Referencia can organize sources into virtual nodes and aggregate their outputs without requiring the country to already operate a complete national node.
Technical collaboration builds trust, capacity and evidence for deeper engagement with national organizations. This prepares the conditions for those countries to join LA Referencia’s governance in the future and contribute to its regional sustainability.
Sources with different roles
Expansion combines directories, organization registries and institutional relationships. Each source contributes a different part of a sequence: locate it, understand its conditions and prepare it for integration.
An international repository directory used to identify sources and curate their records by updating, adding or archiving entries.
Source of repository recordsUsed to identify and normalize research organizations and connect them to the repositories they support.
Source of institutional identityIn member countries, they bring together repositories and content and provide the federated route into the regional collection.
Member-country pathwayIn non-member countries, universities and national organizations help locate sources, validate contacts and conduct assessments.
Non-member-country pathwayExpanding regional infrastructure
The project strengthens existing national nodes and expands LA Referencia’s capacity to progressively incorporate new sources, institutions and countries into a shared regional infrastructure.
Existing federated network
National systems organize sources in member countries and connect them with LA Referencia’s regional services.
Expansion of regional sources
Directories, organization registries and work with universities and national organizations help identify sources and understand their technical conditions.
Progressive incorporation
OAI-PMH and metadata assessment prepares stable aggregations to add research outputs from new countries to the regional collection.
Expanded coverage makes more research outputs visible, connects more countries and creates stronger conditions for expanding LA Referencia’s governance and sustainability.
Coverage progress
The first list includes every LA Referencia member country and shows curation progress during the period. The second presents the non-member countries addressed so far. When the report provides quantitative data, the number indicates documented COAR IRD actions.
Curation status during January–July 2026
Direct identification, curation and assessment
Curation results
During the period, records were updated, added and archived to improve the regional representation of repositories. Most quantified work focused on countries that are not LA Referencia members.
The distribution shows the additional reach the project makes possible beyond current membership.
| Action in COAR IRD | Members | Non-members | Total |
|---|
Reference directory: COAR International Directory of Repositories (IRD) ↗
Ongoing work
Record curation is part of an ongoing process: complete countries in progress, validate source quality and turn assessment into sustainable coverage.
Method and cutoff. January–July 2026. The list shows LA Referencia’s nine member countries at the project cutoff, although not all of them recorded actions in this report. Curation totals are derived from the quantitative table in the Component A progress report and grouped by membership. Panama has no quantitative data and is shown as curation in progress; the Dominican Republic and El Salvador are also still in progress.
Read the Component A report ↗