The Global Scientific Village: Open Access Driving Collaborative Research - Enago Academy

"Current records state that about 36%-46% of research articles origination from the European Union and about 39%-42% of articles from Latin America list international co-authors, which are relatively low ratios. However, these two regions also have open access repositories. In Latin America, LA Referencia hosts more than 1.3 million documents, including articles, reports and theses. Similarly, OpenAIRE is the open access repository for European research. Recently, due to collaboration between both repositories, the data in LA Referencia is now accessible through OpenAIRE. Both OpenAIRE and LA Referencia represent slightly more than half of the world’s open access repositories. As you would expect, they contain a large portion of the world’s research output. These repositories are evidence of the fact that both Europe and Latin America have vibrant open access policies. This merger of the databases could play a role in encouraging collaboration between these regions. Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has more than 100 global members including libraries, research institutions, and funders. The access to data in LA Referencia documents from OpenAIRE was enabled in partnership with COAR. In order to allow the merger of data from different repositories, common guidelines had to be adapted. This facilitated the integration of content and enabled the seamless discovery of documents from these repositories. These three bodies are now working towards promoting greater connectivity within the global research community."