Sharing knowledge. Technology Collaboration. Defining a common Roadmap. These were just some of the aims of the first technical workshop among LA Referencia and OpenAIRE in Heredia, Costa Rica (29 and 30 of October),  with representatives from 12 countries from Latin America.

As part of the OpenAIRE Advance the objectives of the workshop were to:

• Share knowledge and develop agreements for common challenges in OpenAIRE Advance projects (Guidelines, Statistics, Broker),           
• Define a of a Roadmap for implementation in Latin America,                  
• Identify New services that can be transferred / adapted and technological collaboration among OpenAIRE and LA Referencia.     

The meeting was held in the “Universidad Nacional”  with the support of Conare. Presentations by members of OpenAIRE and La Referencia technical managers were given, as well as some regional presentations.

Importance of Open Science 

The event saw the inauguration of LA Referencia Council which highlighted a conversation on  the articulation of open science policy aspects in Latin America and the need of alliances on the first day of the Council  meeting.

The consensus among the technical managers of the nodes of Latin America was that meeting was very important to know first hand the global OpenAIRE developments, it allowed to explore  what are the services than can be relevant for open science in the future and at the same time very concrete and pragmatic on how to advance technical solutions and collaborate in some specific project areas and common challenges at short and medium term.

Main Take-Aways

• Countries commitment to continue the common work and use of OpenAIRE guidelines, 
• Agreement to keep a close collaboration and information exchange, 
• Agreement on Spanish translation of version 4.0 of the OpenAIRE Guidelines will be published in the next months,
• Possible future collaboration on webinars in specific topics and project information of some Latin American funders to be integrated as  pilot in OpenAIRE.

Every country in Latin America made specific commitments on actions such as testing, plug in installation in representative samples of repositories, programming efforts, hardware. This will  accomplish the task of distributed statists and implement the broker services by year 2000 in Latin America. A formal report will be published later with the results. 

This workshop was part of the WP5 - Global OA Scholarly Communication Infrastructure, led by COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories). It continues Guidelines alignment among the Europe and Latin America: “In particular, LA Referencia will act as the first pilot outside of Europe for several services and practices developed by OpenAIRE”.