Since the establishment of the first DataCite consortium in Latin America in 2020, we’ve been wanting to engage with our community in person. After three years of webinars and virtual meetings, DataCite Connect Buenos Aires brought together our Latin American community for an in-person meeting co-located with the csv,conf,v7. We are happy that members from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico joined us to network and discuss DataCite adoption and collaboration in Latin America.
We kicked off the meeting by sharing an overview of DataCite’s strategic initiatives in 2023 and the current Latin American landscape. When it comes to DataCite membership and adoption, Latin America is not a newcomer but rather a consolidated community. There are currently consortia in Brasil (led by CNPQ), Chile (led by the Data Observatory and the University of Chile), Colombia (led by Consortia) México (led by eSCIRE), and Panamá (led by Senacyt). Overall these local communities include 38 organizations that have registered 247538 DOIs.
Our special guest, Maria Gould (California Digital Library, CDL) presented the ROR initiative (supported by DataCite along with Crossref and CDL) and opportunities for integration in the Latin American context.
Connecting
The goal of the DataCite Connect events is to bring our community together in one room to have lively discussions and exchange ideas. To break the ice, we played the DataCite Bingo where attendees had to present themselves, interact with each other, and find out who drinks mate without sugar, is a Boca Juniors fan, or has delivered a webinar about DataCite, among other categories. It was great to see people laughing and getting to know each other.
After congratulating the bingo winner, we started discussing how to move forward with collaboration in the region. Participants formed three groups to discuss the following topics:
1) how to improve communications and increase awareness about DataCite infrastructure and membership,
2) how to address technical challenges
3) how to cooperate in the near future.
Participants commented that more communication activities in Spanish (events, webinars, documentation, use cases, tutorials, training, and certification) would be beneficial for the Latin American community. Participants also highlighted the need to have an Argentinian DataCite consortium to build on the leadership and successes of Universidad Nacional de Rosario (UNR) which is the first organization in the country to have a Dataverse data repository with DOI integration.
Takeaways
- Need for in-person collaboration. This was the first time we hosted an event for our Latin American community and the first time almost all of our Latin American consortia met in person. This meeting helped strengthen regional connections and we hope it will help to foster more cooperation in the near future.
- DataCite has a consolidated community in Latin America, with many local success stories of adoption. We need to continue to increase our efforts to promote these use cases and amplify them throughout the region and beyond so that the wider research community can benefit from these connections and DataCite’s open infrastructure.
We want to leverage our recently launched Global Access Program to continue working with and strengthening our Latin American community, led by our new Regional Engagement Specialist, Arturo Garduño-Magaña.
