Research Data Repositories from Latin America: Analysis and Proposal of Library Functions to Implement Open Science | Mousaion: South African Journal of Information Studies

Abstract:  Globally, the open science movement has as its main principle the openness of publicly funded data and research outputs. It is essential that actors in this movement include the development and implementation of legal, technical and technological infrastructure. The premise of this research was that if the purpose of open science is free access to research products, then technological infrastructure is fundamental to crystallise availability, visibility, reproducibility and unrestricted access. The research aimed to identify actions of the open science movement in Latin America and study technological infrastructure for data repositories developed and implemented there. The methodology comprised a bibliographic review and quantitative methods. For the exploratory analysis, the sources for retrieval of information were official Web portals of library entities, the Registry of Research Data Repositories, and the Dataverse Project. The search was based on defined variables, namely actions, data repository, infrastructure, library collaboration, and repositories in the Registry of Research Data Repositories and Dataverse. Findings were studied through a descriptive content analysis based on defined variables. We found that nine Latin American countries carry out open science actions; eight develop research data repositories; eight implement technological infrastructure to develop repositories; seven collaborate with libraries in open science actions; and seven have their repositories recorded in the Registry of Research Data Repositories and Dataverse, resulting in 62 research data repositories in Latin America. We concluded that these libraries are actors and laboratories with methodological and pragmatic elements that contribute to the organisation, reproducibility, transparency, management and open access that support the paradigm shift which the scholarly communication system requires.