News

LA Referencia decided, in 2011, to adopt Driver 2.0 guidelines. The implementation mechanisms were agreed in mid-2012 for 10 fields. Nearly three years after that decision, this document presents and updates the fields in a more detailed format; indicates recommendations for all the fields present in Driver; includes clarifications and changes derived from OpenAIRE (which currently maintains the guidelines) and defines the main areas to work in future releases.

The main audience of this document are the national nodes. It is probable that some of these alignments (depending on the field) will be reached at the level of transformation in the node of LA Referencia and in the national node. At the same time, it presents a roadmap for the regional repositories to inform the key elements at international level to sustain interoperability and quality, keeping the details of the implementation to the specific progress of each country.

Central elements

The biggest change, with absolute consensus among the representatives of LA Referencia, was to make mandatory the field "Rights" (dc: rights). It means that, at the access level, every document harvested by LA Referencia should contain an explicit statement of Open Access based on the international vocabulary and our tradition in this area. So, will only be collected openAcess or embargoedAcess documents. With regard to the licenses, the use of Creative Commons is recommended.

• openAccess (Open Access): Access without restrictions
• embargoedAccess (embargoed): The resource is restricted until is released in open access on a certain date

The other agreed changes were:

• The fields Description, Subject, Language and Publisher passed from Recommended to Mandatory, if applicable.
• The field Contributor was included as recommended and was established that, for the director or supervisor of a Thesis, should be mandatory, if applicable.
• It was included and explained that Relation, Coverage and Audience are Optional (As well as in Driver 2 and OpenAIRE).
• It was decided to keep the dc field: format as recommended.

The following document presents an executive summary, in Spanish, of the changes: Síntesis Reglas de Metadatos LA Referencia

For illustrative purposes, it has an English version in which are compared the Driver guidelines, OpenAIRE and LA Referencia Guidelines: Guidelines Compatibility Overview

Finally, the complete PDF document can be found through the following link: Metadatos y Políticas de Cosecha

Prospects and future developments

This effort began in mid-2014 as part of the work plan of LA Referencia and is complementary with its participation, through RedCLARA, in the project OpenAire2020, funded by Horizonte2020 program. Initiated in 2015, one of the objectives is to "create an international OA repository collaboration platform to support global research and truly scholarly communication". Specifically, the third work package, led by COAR, seeks "... to accelerate current activities in the area of interoperability by Promoting alignment, and Facilitating the exchange of good practices and the adoption of shared indicators, services and technologies across regional networks ".

The adoption of the Driver guidelines undoubtedly meant a great effort; but, with the perspective of time, it was a correct decision that allowed a significant advance in the quality of metadata, in the visibility of our scientific production and in the interoperability at the regional level.

Given the nature of LA Referencia, whose associates are public institutions of Science and Technology of the region, it was decided that the challenges to work in the next two to three years will be recommendations on some key aspects such as ProjectID (the identification of the I+D projects which led to scientific results); the relationship with data repositories and alternatives to AuthorID. Also, we will prioritize, in our view and decisions, the goal of international interoperability in order to create a system that supports the strategies of Open Access repositories.