PUBLIC GOODS FOR SCIENTIFIC DATA POLICIES IN LATIN AMERICA
Paper presented at:
The Latin America and the Caribbean Scientific Data Management Workshop.
Organized by ICSU-WDS, the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) and the Museum of Tomorrow. Panel 2: Challenges for data management projects in Latin America &
the Caribbean. 17-18 of April. Río de Janeiro. Brasil.
2 Abstract Title
Public goods for scientific data policies in Latin America1 Full Name
Amaro De Melo, Bianca; Azrilevich, Paola; Cabezas, Alberto; Muñoz Palma, Patricia;
Nakano, Silvia.
e- mail
bianca@ibict.br
pazrilevich@mincyt.gob.ar alberto.cabezas@redclara.net pmunoz@conicyt.cl
snakano@mincyt.gob.ar Affiliation/Organization
Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia (IBICT); Brasil.
Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva. Argentina Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica. Chile LA Referencia
Country *
Brasil Argentina, Chile.
Abstract
This paper presents LA Referencia’s vision and actions regarding open science in general and scientific open data in particular for Latin America. LA Referencia is the network of open access repositories from nine Latin American countries that supports national open access strategies and policies through shared standards, metadata guidelines, and a single discovery platform. It harvests metadata of scholarly articles, theses and dissertations from national nodes. This federated platform came out of technical and political agreements between public science and technology organizations (National Ministries and Science & Technology Departments) with support of RedCLARA. It involves national nodes from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru.
LA Referencia also fosters an articulation of policies and actions in open science, in order to create an ecosystem of open scientific information in the region as public good, led by the organisms of S & T. The service and actions in Open Science are
1 Note: This document is partially based on a concept paper by LA Referencia called “Políticas para la Ciencia Abierta y los Datos Científicos en América Latina”. Feb. 2018.
3 based on policy agreements; guidelines and technology. This paper describes the regional context, priorities and vision on research data. For example, research data that validate the publications; data collected or generated with public funds or based on Data Management Plans. In addition, it includes a description of recommendations for metadata standards (Datacite), technology (open source and transferable), licenses (creative commons); among others. It presents the actions regarding internationalization in the context of Coar and OpenAIRE. Finally, it includes a reflection on alignment with F.A.I.R Principles and concludes with a summary of the key elements that characterize LA Referencia’s approach to research data as a public good.
Bio
Bianca Amaro. Coordinadora do Laboratorio de Metodologías de Tratamento e Disseminacao da Informacao del IBICT. Coordinadora de la Biblioteca Digital Brasileira de Teses e Dissertações – BDTD y do Portal Oasisbr. Consejo LA Referencia.
Paola A. Azrilevich. Coordinadora del Sistema Nacional de Repositorios Digitales y la Biblioteca Electrónica de Ciencia y Tecnología del Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva.
Alberto Cabezas. Secretario Ejecutivo de LA Referencia. Responsable A. Latina en el proyecto OpenAIRE 2020.
Patricia Muñoz Palma. Directora del Departamento de Información Científica de la Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica de Chile. Miembro del International Data Policy Committee CODATA , y Presidenta de LA Referencia.
Silvia Nakano. Directora nacional de Recursos Físicos de Ciencia y Tecnología del Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva, Argentina. Consejo de LA Referencia.
4
Public goods for scientific data policies in Latin America
The following paper presents LA Referencia’s vision and actions regarding open science in general and scientific open data in particular for Latin America.
LA Referencia is the network of open access repositories from nine Latin American countries that supports national open access strategies and policies through shared standards, metadata guidelines, and a single discovery platform. To achieve this purpose, it harvests metadata of scholarly articles, theses and dissertations from national nodes, from repositories at universities and research institutions in each country. This platform came out of technical and political agreements between public science and technology organizations (National Ministries and Science &
Technology Departments) to provide a common network for open access publications with the support of RedCLARA. The organization involves national nodes operated or designated by governments from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru.2
LA Referencia aims to create a truly comprehensive platform to support research and scholarly communication with the objective of increasing the visibility of science, in participating countries, and currently represents more than 90% of the scientific production in the region. The conviction of the S & T organizations in LA Referencia, is that knowledge is a public good and the scientific results -financed totally or partially with public funds- must be available in open access (OA).
2The current members of LA Referencia Council are:
Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva, Mincyt; Argentina Instituto Brazileiro de Informação Ciência e Tecnologia, Ibict; Brazil
Colciencias, Ministerio de Educación. Nodo Renata/SNAAC; Colombia Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica, Conicyt; Chile
Secretaria de Educación Superior, Ciencia y Tecnología, Senescyt. Nodo CEDIA/RRAAE; Ecuador Viceministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, Ministerio Educación; Nodo CBUES/RAICES; El Salvador Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología, Conacyt. Nodo Remeri; México
Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Tecnológica; Concytec; Perú Cooperación Latinoamericana de Redes Avanzadas; RedCLARA
Conare. Nodo Kimuk; Costa Rica
5 Public goods and Open Science
Nowadays, there is a trend in the organisms of S & T to promote the Open Science (OS), with special focus on scientific open data policies. LA Referencia fosters an articulation of policies and actions in open science, in order to create an ecosystem of open scientific information in the region as public good, led by the organisms of science and technology. In this context, the service is based on: Policy agreements;
guidelines and technology.
A good definition of open science is offered by OECD:
“Open science commonly refers to efforts to make the output of publicly funded research more widely accessible in digital format to the scientific community, the business sector, or society more generally. Open science is the encounter between the age-old tradition of openness in science and the tools of information and communications technologies (ICTs) that have reshaped the scientific enterprise and require a critical look from policy makers seeking to promote long-term research as well as innovation”.3
Certainly, this concept should be understood as a process to improve the quality and impact of research. Likewise, Open Science is a general framework of initiatives about how the dissemination of knowledge should be incorporated and covers areas such as citizen science, scientific data, peer review and open procedures, new metrics, among others.4
In this context, LA Referencia’s contribution, in addition to its existing Open Access efforts in scientific publications, is to promote open scientific data with the generation of public goods in metadata guidelines, interoperability, technology, and policies.
3 Making Open Science a Reality. OECD, 15 Oct 2015 DOI: 10.1787/5jrs2f963zs1-en https://www.innovationpolicyplatform.org/content/open-science
4 Fecher, B. and Friesike, S. (2013). Open Science: One Term, Five Schools of Thought. In: Bartling, S.
and Friesike (Eds.), Opening Science New York, NY: Springer, pp. 17-47. Available
at: http://book.openingscience.org/basics_background/open_science_one_term_five_schools_of_thou ght.html
6 The view is that scientific data produced with public funds for R & D, will allow to:
Reproduce and validate the results in a better way
Generate new research and knowledge from existing open scientific data
Provide more transparency to funds applied to research
Preserve the integrity of the investigation
Avoid duplication of efforts
Also, an essential feature is that Latin America has national AA legislations (Peru and Argentina in 2013 and Mexico in 2014), which includes scientific data as part of their policy. On the other hand, Chile with CONICYT, is promoting a policy of scientific data, and Brazil launched a Manifesto for open data from IBICT in 2017.
Nevertheless, repositories of scientific data are incipient in the region.5
From another angle, in the last two meetings of the Directive Council of LA Referencia, it was determined that actions must be carried in the scope of Open Science with a number of decisions detailed, in part in this document. (San Luis de Potosí, 2016, Buenos Aires, 2017). 6
A model and regional priorities for research data
The Region has particularities with respect to the rest of the world to place a Scientific Data strategy:
The culture of scientific production in Latin America is non-commercial with a strong culture and policies of Open Access.
Unlike the rest of the world, the funds for R & D continues to come mainly from the State: either directly or indirectly.
An important part of the members of LA Referencia controls various aspects of the value chain. From the financing of R & D, evaluation of production, to the consortium purchase of information.
5R3DATA http://service.re3data.org/browse/by-country/
ICSU World Data System. https://www.icsu-wds.org/services/data-portal
6 Acta Buenos Aires (2017).
http://www.lareferencia.info/joomla/en/documents/documentos/actas-consejo-directivo/acta- buenos-aires-2017/64-acta-buenos-aires-2017
Acta San Luis de Potosí (2016).
http://www.lareferencia.info/joomla/en/documents/documentos/actas-consejo-directivo/consejo- mexico-2016/51-acta-consejo-directivo-mexico
7
There is asymmetry in the economic and technical realities inside each country and among LA Referencia members. To alleviate this, it is important to advocate for international collaboration and to promote policies that avoids duplication of efforts.
In order to maximize the impact, LA Referencia has decided that the priorities are set on the scientific data that sustain and validate the publications; secondly in data collected or generated with public funds; and finally in the research results based on Data Management Plans (DMP) that increasingly will be part of the research proposals to be financed with public funds.
In this context, there are some established international networks or with a tradition in this field (for example: astronomy, biodiversity, oceanography).
However, national and regional initiatives are incipient. Finally, it is considered that the priority of LA Referencia is the articulation with services and repositories of scientific data that are open, interoperable, non-commercial, and with some level of social and development impact.
A regional approach: Knowledge, licenses and technology
Knowledge description always involves metadata guidelines. There are a number of disciplines and areas that have specific metadata recommendations that is appropriate. However, also it is necessary to suggest a general recommendation for the description of all types of scientific data for interdisciplinary repositories and LA Referencia has decided to recommend Datacite v. 4.1 for that goal. This decision is based on its widespread acceptance for interdisciplinary repositories. Nevertheless, it encourages that thematic repositories add disciplinary recommendations with some core elements to facilitate interoperability.7
All these decision also need to be synergistic and / or complementary with the initiatives of scientific journals that mostly are noncommercial in the region. A priority focus is to collaborate on interoperability between repositories of scientific data and publications , that allow linking of the results.
In second place, are necessary recommendations on the type of licenses that are most convenient for users to facilitate the use with legal certainty. In this regard, Creative Commons licenses is recommended, which is the “de facto” standard in
7 See for example OpenAIRE Guidelines for Data Archives.
https://guidelines.openaire.eu/en/latest/data/index.html
For example, genomics, biodiversity, etc. A list of standards can be find at.
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/metadata-standards
8 Latin America and, also widespread worldwide. Likewise, it is suggested that convenient alternatives are CC BY 4.0 that is considered “liberal”, or another that is noncommercial such as International Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0, also commonly known as CC BY NC-SA 4.0.
Thirdly, regarding network design, some organizations opted for centralized services in the "cloud", and others prefer systems located in physical or territorial dependencies due to existing legislations. Nevertheless, it is convenient to maintain the flexible model of the LA Referencia based on interoperable and federated structures of national nodes. That explains that the technology for harvester platforms of scientific data and metadata in national nodes should be open source and transferable, and can harvest, validate and transform metadata from diverse systems in development with standard protocols (OAI-PMH).
Finally, regarding those systems used for data repositories , also it is convenient that the technologies are open source, free and transferable. Experience in the region for repository publications has shown that is a path to achieve greater use and innovation. As a result, it avoid early closure of technologies and standards that could lead to "lock in".
Incentives and Internationalization
Given that Open Science is also a cultural change, it is considered necessary for institutions, agencies and states to implement actions, recommendations, and mandates that promote this shift. An action that will have real impact is that the activities related to the dissemination of scientific data should be considered as a factor in the evaluation of academic careers.
In relation to the international dimension, LA Referencia, since January 2015, participates in coordination with the Open Access Confederation (COAR) in the OpenAIRE project, financed by the Horizon 2020 program. There is roadmap among OpenAIRE (in Europe) and LA Referencia (in Latin America) regarding common guidelines for open access repositories and services. 8 Today OpenAIRE also leads part of the initiatives in open science and scientific data in Europe and will continue this collaborative effort at an international level that strengthens the insertion of our research and offers tangible benefits and synergies. In fact, LA Referencia is part
8 EU and Latin America working together towards a common Open Access implementation.
https://www.openaire.eu/latin-america-current-state-and-implementation-of-guidelines
9 of the new project OpenAIRE advance that will implement common statistics, capacity building, and new services in the regions. 9
Conclusions
The above elements are aligned with the F.A.I.R. principles, for its acronym in English, which are being implemented in Horizon 2020 for data .
"FAIR data management in general terms, your research data should be 'FAIR', that is findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable. These principles precede implementation choices and do not necessarily suggest any specific technology, standard, or implementation solution." 10
In this paper we have shown concrete decisions and policies that are clearly aligned with the FAIR principles such as: Metadata Guidelines, use of standard and open protocols, a model based on strong open access policies, licenses recommendations, search engine registration through national nodes.
Based on the above points, the approximation of LA Reference is characterized by the following elements:
A model based on the federation of national nodes that aims to harvest scientific data metadata under common policy, technology and guidelines agreements.
Use of open and transferable standards and technologies with a non- commercial approach.
Generation of public goods that facilitate the construction of alternatives without creating early barriers.
International connection with similar initiatives to advance in interoperability and avoid duplication of efforts.
Concrete actions oriented to follow F.A.I.R principles in the policy design.
9 About OpenAIRE-Advance. https://www.openaire.eu/advance
10 See H2020 Program. Guidelines on FAIR data management.
http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/grants_manual/hi/oa_pilot/h2020-hi- oa-data-mgt_en.pd
Also for a general view see. Nature (2016). The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Scientific Data 3, Article number: 160018 (2016) doi:10.1038/sdata.2016.18.
http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201618
