What’s Brewing in the OpenAIRE Infrastructure? LA Referencia at the OpenAIRE Technical Meeting

From 13 to 16 January 2026, OpenAIRE hosted its bi-annual technical meeting in Athens, bringing together the OpenAIRE technical team to reflect on the evolution of the OpenAIRE infrastructure in practice. Discussions focused on how its core systems, data architecture, and service layer are developed, aligned, and scaled, while also looking ahead to the next generation of OpenAIRE services and architectural priorities, explored in more detail in this blog post on what's next for the OpenAIRE infrastructure. 

This edition of the meeting also marked an important milestone: one year since the signing of the collaboration agreement between OpenAIRE and LA Referencia. While the agreement formalised the partnership in 2025, collaboration between the two infrastructures has been developing for several years through concrete technical work, shared interoperability goals, and a common commitment to open, community-governed research infrastructures.

This collaboration comes at a particularly timely moment. In late 2025, LA Referencia received new support from Invest in Open Infrastructure to strengthen its technical capacity and advance work on shared, non-commercial research infrastructure. This investment reinforces LA Referencia's role as a key regional infrastructure and provides a strong foundation for deeper, long-term collaboration with OpenAIRE at the technical and service level.

As part of this ongoing collaboration, OpenAIRE invited Lautaro Matas, Technical Manager at LA Referencia, to participate in the Athens meeting. The aim was to align technical priorities and work together on concrete aspects of infrastructure development, moving beyond high-level coordination to hands-on collaboration around data, services, and standards.

What emerged was a shared and actionable technical agenda for the next phase of cooperation.

From alignment to implementation: collaborating at the infrastructure layer

A key theme of the meeting was the value of working directly at the infrastructure level. Rather than focusing only on shared principles or policy alignment, collaboration took place around real data flows, concrete services, and interoperability mechanisms that shape how the OpenAIRE infrastructure operates in practice.

This hands-on approach accelerates the path from ideas to implementation, while also building trust and shared understanding between technical teams. It also ensures that collaboration remains sustainable over time, rooted in shared components rather than parallel or duplicated solutions.

During the meeting, OpenAIRE and LA Referencia agreed to focus their joint work on five concrete areas.

• Metadata exchange and graph enrichment
  Bidirectional exchange between LA Referencia and the OpenAIRE Graph to enrich regional and global discovery, ensuring stronger representation of Latin American research outputs.
• Multilingual discovery and language technologies
  Joint exploration of multilingual embeddings and language models to enable cross-language discovery based on meaning, improving visibility and accessibility beyond English.
• Usage data and repository statistics
  Alignment on usage data collection and analytics, including shared approaches to repository plugins (e.g. DSpace) and transparent exchange of aggregated usage statistics.
• Interoperability guidelines consolidation
  Joint work on consolidating OpenAIRE Guidelines for literature, data, and software to simplify implementation and ensure consistent interoperability across infrastructures.
• Decentralised identifiers and ARK exploration
  Exploration of decentralised approaches to persistent identifiers, including ARK-based models, in response to growing interest from European countries in resilient, sovereign, and non-centralised PID infrastructures.

How shared infrastructure shapes long-term collaboration

A recurring insight from the discussions was how shared infrastructure changes the nature of collaboration over time.

Working together around the OpenAIRE Graph, interoperability guidelines, and service components creates a common technical ground. This enables partnerships to evolve through shared building blocks rather than isolated integrations, supporting scalability, sustainability, and long-term alignment with other international initiatives.

By anchoring collaboration in open infrastructure, both OpenAIRE and LA Referencia strengthen their ability to respond to new technical and community needs while remaining interoperable, transparent, and publicly governed.

Reflecting on the meeting, Natalia Manola, CEO of OpenAIRE, noted,

"When collaboration is grounded in the OpenAIRE infrastructure itself, alignment becomes practical rather than theoretical. Working directly with partners like LA Referencia on data, services, and interoperability allows us to move faster, build trust, and ensure that the infrastructure we operate remains globally relevant, inclusive, and sustainable."

Reflecting on the discussion, Lautaro Matas, Technical Manager at LA Referencia, shared, 

"OpenAIRE played a fundamental role in the early stages of LA Referencia. The technical collaboration and alignment established over the years were key to ensuring the visibility of Latin American research outputs within the OpenAIRE Graph and the broader global research ecosystem.

This technical meeting allowed us to build on that shared history and, importantly, to define a concrete and practical agenda for the next phase of collaboration. By focusing on complementary capacities rather than parallel developments, we can mutually strengthen the quality and resilience of our regional infrastructures while contributing more effectively to the global open science ecosystem—without duplicating efforts"