Persistent identifiers are playing a key role in driving more robust research infrastructure and open science initiatives across Latin America. This was a primary theme at the event “Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) and Open Science in Latin America” (#PIDsLATAM23) held on April 18 in Buenos Aires (Argentina) during csv,conf,v7.
Organized by DataCite, ROR, and ORCID, the event was attended by more than 70 research stakeholders from across the Latin American region and elsewhere, representing 40 different institutions in total.
Aimed at research administrators, library directors, and technical staff, the full-day program featured a series of in-depth presentations—all in Spanish—about how persistent identifiers are being implemented and used in national, consortial, and institutional settings to advance open science and increase the discoverability and visibility of research in Latin America. The goal was to present use cases and success stories and bring together stakeholders with shared interests and challenges in a Spanish-language setting.
The first set of presentations focused on large-scale initiatives that are aimed at enabling open science with persistent identifiers. Gustavo Durand from The Dataverse Project discussed how PIDs are being implemented in the platform to make research data and other works more openly available; Abel del Carpio from CONCYTEC in Peru discussed the organization’s strategy with regard to leveraging PIDs on a national level; and Washington Segundo from IBICT and LA Referencia discussed efforts in Brazil and across Latin America to develop open science infrastructure using PIDs.
Review the Session 1 presentations
- Gustavo Durand, “Dataverse y los PIDs,” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7860265
- Abel del Carpio, “Plataformas de CTI y los identificadores persistentes (PIDs) en el Perú,” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7860287
- Washington Segundo, “Los PIDs y la ciencia abierta: perspectiva Brasil y América Latina,” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7860279
The next series of presentations focused on global persistent identifier services for enabling more open and interoperable research infrastructure across Latin America and beyond, featuring DataCite (Gabi Mejias), ORCID (Ana Cardoso), and ROR (Maria Gould).
Review the Session 2 presentations
- Gabi Mejias, “Conectando la investigación con DataCite,” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7860319
- Ana Cardoso, “PIDs y ORCID,” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7860315
- Maria Gould, “ROR, El Registro Abierto de Identificadores Persistentes para Organizaciones de Investigación,” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7860464
The third and final series of presentations focused on specific implementations of persistent identifiers in Latin American research infrastructure. This session highlighted institutional use cases at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario in Argentina (Paola Carolina Bongiovani, Paulina Freán, Analía Salazar) and Universidad de Chile (Rodrigo Donoso) to implement persistent identifiers in library and repository systems, and examples of consortia-level implementations by Consortia from Colombia (Paula Saavedra) and eScire (Nydia Lopez and Joel Torres) from Mexico.
Review the Session 3 presentations
- Paola Carolina Bongiovani, Paulina Freán, Analía Salazar, “Implementación de PIDs en América Latina REPOSITORIO DE DATOS ACADÉMICOS RDA-UNR dataverse.unr.edu.ar,” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7860470
- Rodrigo Donoso Vegas, “Implementación PIDs en América Latina. Experiencia de la Universidad de Chile,” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7860501
- Paula Saavedra Ochoa, “Gestión de identificadores persistentes consorciados,” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7860524
- Nydia Lopez and Joel Torres, “Consorcio eSCIRE,” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7860513
At the conclusion of the program, audience members participated in an interactive brainstorming session to share their impressions about the state of PIDs implementations in Latin America and raise questions and ideas about how to move forward to achieve greater adoption. The participants responded to three prompts:
- What would you like to see happen with PIDs in Latin America?
- What are the challenges to PIDs adoption in the region?
- What can we do to address these challenges?
In the responses to the online poll, several themes stood out: the importance of shared infrastructure and of collaboration, the necessity of making PIDs infrastructure more accessible, the value of having more training and capacity-building, and the ongoing need to continue raising awareness of how to work with PIDs and of the benefits they provide.
Throughout the day, the sessions and participant engagement demonstrated not only a high level of interest in the topic of PIDs and open science in Latin America, but also generated new ideas and opportunities for future collaborations and follow-up actions.
We at DataCite, ORCID, and ROR express our gratitude for the effusive response to this event and the satellite discussions that took place on the preceding and following days, all of which speak to the leading role that Latin America is playing in developing infrastructures, policies, and practices for promoting collaboration around open knowledge, redistributing global research networks, and making it possible for all countries to have greater access to science and technology. It was great to meet the Latin American community in person and we hope to continue working together to build an open and robust research infrastructure!