Building Digital Public Goods of Open Research Information for Inclusiveness and Sustainability of Scientific Communication: The Latin American use case

The nature of the World Wide Web entails, conceptually and technically, the principle of universality. Anyone can benefit and contribute to it. The net paradigm based on decentralization has been critical to the Web’s growth and innovation. It is also a key factor in achieving diversity. Open infrastructures providing open research information acting as digital public goods should comply with criteria such as relevance to Sustainable Development Goals, open licenses, clear ownership, platform independence, documentation, mechanisms for extracting data, among others. The sustainability of such digital public goods should be secured collectively and the universal service they provide should be assessed. In Latin America, the dissemination of knowledge has been the responsibility of the academic and research sectors, mainly sustained with public funds. Its components, such as journals and repositories, have been open by default and they provide a universal service. The condition of diversity of knowledge, methodologies, research agendas, metadata richness, and languages is directly proportional to the capacity of inclusivity and interconnectivity of diverse open data sources. Today, Latin America has important research information infrastructures, at the regional and national levels, as well as thousands of journals and hundreds of repositories articulated at different levels and layers of interoperability to generate new public goods from existing ones, within an interconnected ecosystem of knowledge. However, it is also very important to note the degradation of public goods due to the adoption of commercial strategies, and some public policies and practices that are limiting the scope of open data integration, such as inequities in technology access and the necessary involvement of those traditionally underrepresented groups. Building on data sources of research information to enable digital public goods is a sustainable and responsible way to contribute to fulfill the commitments of the Barcelona Declaration.