IARLA | Pathways to Open: The Global Impact of Repositories

All right, well, we might get going. So, good afternoon, good morning, good evening. It's certainly evening here in Australia, where I'm joining you from. Um and welcome to everyone joining us for this second ARLA session on pathways to open, the the global impact of repositories, with a focus today on the Americas. My name's Jane Angel, and I'm the CEO of the Council of Australasian University Librarians, CAUL. And in collaboration with William Nixon, Deputy Executive Director of RLUK, we've organized two webinars today, ably supported by our RLUK and CAUL colleagues providing technical support in the background. Earlier today, William introduced us to some really impressive work occurring in India and Japan, when he chaired a very informative session with speakers Kazu Yamaji, the Deputy General Manager of Cyber Science Infrastructure at the National Institute of Informatics, and Professor Devika Madalli, Director, Information and Library Network Centre in India. We're running these webinars to provide a global perspective, which highlights the critical role research libraries play in advancing open access through their leadership and stewardship of repositories as essential scholarly infrastructure. It's been really great to see the level of interest across the webinars with approximately 100 registrations on our earlier session today, and we'll make the recordings available for you within about a week. Before we start, I would like to acknowledge country. CAUL Council members are located throughout Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand, and we acknowledge the traditional owners of kaitiaki of the lands on which we live and work across this region. We pay our respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Māori, and First Nations people here today, their elders past and present, and we acknowledge the contributions made by First Nations colleagues to CAUL and CAUL member institutions. I'd also like to pay my respects to the traditional owners of the land where I live and work on the Kaurna country of the Adelaide Plains, or Tarntanya, which is the Kaurna word for Adelaide, which means the place of the red kangaroo. I'd also like to acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded, and this matters very deeply to how we think about knowledge stewardship and openness. A coup- a couple of housekeeping remarks. The webinar is being recorded, as I said, and will be delivered to those who have registered. Please ensure your microphone is muted for now. Um and please use the Zoom chat to make comments and to ask questions. William and I will collate the questions and will be posing those to our speakers when both speakers have finished. So, who is IARLA? IARLA is a platform for collaboration amongst its members, who work together on a voluntary basis to develop agreed positions in support of emerging international research library agendas and open scholarship. The alliance is governed by its founding members of five research library organizations: CAUL, RLUK, LIBER, the Association of Research Libraries in the US, and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. We work collectively to keep abreast of shared strategic themes and priority areas that are prevalent in all of our organizations and regions. And briefly, who is CAUL? CAUL is the peak leadership body representing university libraries across Australasia and Oceania. We bring together research-intensive and teaching-focused institutions, large and small, metropolitan and regional. CAUL is made up of three major components: the council, who are the 46 university librarians across Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand, the governing board of which we have seven directors, and the CAUL office, a distributed group of professionals who operationalize the vision of the council and the board, and that's where my role sits. And some of the things that we do are facilitating connection and collaboration, optimizing collective knowledge, expertise, and resources, and driving impact at scale, as well as providing strategic leadership in open knowledge. But onto our speakers today. I'm very pleased to introduce you to Latara Matass, the technical manager of La Referencia, joining us from Spain today, and Christie Holmes, the director of the Galter Health Sciences Library and Learning Center, and she's also the co-lead of the US Repository Network, which is what she'll be speaking about today. And we really thank them so much for joining in their respective time zones, and really excited about what they're going to share with us today. So firstly, I'd like to introduce a little more fully to Latara, who's about to speak. He's the technical manager at La Referencia, and the project leader and developer of La Referencia software platform. Latara studied computer science at the University of Buenos Aires, and since 2002, he's been a member of the Center for Studies on Science, Development, and Higher Education. He was part of the technical team of the Ibero-American Network of Science and Technology Indicators, and between 2005 and 2011, he worked at the Argentinian Center for Scientific and Technological Information, overseeing the implementation and coordination of the SciELO Argentina project, and later the development of software for the area of patents and strategic intelligence. Between 2009 and 2019, he was part of the technical team of the Ibero-American Observatory of Science, Technology, and Society, acting as coordinator and developer of Porta Intelijo, an open explorer of open access repositories and collections of of invention patents based on natural language processing and data mining techniques. So, without further ado, I'm going to stop sharing my screen and hand over to Lautaro, who will be chatting to us now. Thank you, Lautaro. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you all uh for the invitation. Um it's a pleasure for me to be here. I am talking about from Spain, but I am originally from Argentina, so English is not my mother language. So, be patient, please. Uh I will share my screen now. Uh Just let me know if you see it. My presentation, are you seeing my presentation? It's okay? Uh So, today uh I will introduce for for the ones that don't know La Referencia what La Referencia is. We are in We born as a as a project of of the Inter-American Development Bank, uh a project for public goods. The idea was to build a regional repository network as a public good. Uh so, the the concept of public good is part of our DNA, and we keep uh insisting on trying to preserve that concept for and uh and that model uh for every every project and every component that we do. Uh later on, the different sign of science and technology ministries and and agencies committed together to to build uh an initiative a regional network uh sustained it by the countries back public funding uh when the the project ended. So, so at the end our born uh date could be uh that that they the sign this the signing of the agreement between countries. So, uh we created them uh this this this collaboration effort sustained it by the governments and also uh the governance it's is integrated by the representatives of the science and technology institutions of our countries. Uh today we have 10 countries and growing. Uh it's always changing you know you know that our region and the world now is actually very unstable in terms of political changes. So, we are always trying to keep the governance uh involved and engaged with us. But again, the policies sometimes some country goes out. Now, we are trying to change that with a project that I will comment in a moment. So, but uh the our organization model is a federation, a network of networks. So, each country actually managed its own repositories. We we develop we develop a this software that is an aggregation and a portal and an an OAI-PMH provider that the countries installs and runs and then the the they are the ones harvesting the repositories and open access diamond journals in order to build national uh aggregators and collections that we later harvest and curate at the regional level. So, we have these three levels, the institutional repository, uh the national nodes and the referential nodes. And of course, we interoperate with other major global initiatives such OpenAire, Core, and and so on. So, we now have 5.5 millions of publications from 11 countries. Uh also former level of also former countries, we keep collecting and harvesting the the collections even if the country is not participating in the governance. Uh so, federation for us was the practical practical answer because dealing with the repositories from a regional level, at least in our region region that we don't have a European Commission and we don't have like a other instruments and organization that that that for helping us to engage with the repositories, this federation uh model uh was the answer for us to reach the repositories and also deal with the different realities and the diversity of the countries in our region. So, every national node knows about their own scientific system and how the institutions work. So, that that that's that was our our way to do it with that. So, federations it's a good combination for respect the the the local sovereignty and and also and but at the same time build something bigger, something that could work at regional level and at the same time engage with a global level. So, Uh so, based on this on the on the software and the technical and this technical network, we built some agreements and then we move to go for the challenge of our regions. And then some important projects that we are running thanks to the support of major initiatives such as for for example in this case, we have the big project with LIR AC is they are funding us to help our regions to develop and in and update and improve our repository network, which is mostly based on DSpace. And as you know, the update of DSpace was a challenge in all part in all around the world, but especially in our regions in our region because the documentation is mostly in English and the lack of technical resources. So, we build this project and we are running these projects to help institutions given technical support, documentation in Spanish and Portuguese. And this is part of what we are doing to improve the the institutional level of our federation. And the other project that is that began this year and is very important for us is the IOI Invest in Open Infrastructure Fund for Network Adoption. The we were selected last year to to run this project. We presented a proposal to build some essential elements for our open science infrastructure based on the idea of expanding our collection to all the countries, no matter if they are members or no or not. We want to to to harvest and have metadata from different research system integrated in our collection. So, and also we are working on this in- increasing this coverage and not also at institutional level, but also bringing and trying to recover different kinds of scientific production and metadata that that is now outside our region. Such for example, data metadata that it's deposited or or articles in Zenodo or data in Zenodo to just to name an example. So, we have a lot of scientific production that is not in the repositories and should be there. And the other thing is that we have a big issue with a persistent identifiers because in our region in the repositories and in the diamond journals, the coverage of DOI is very low, about 20%. And that's because financial the memberships or the cost, but also political problems or even administrative problem when you try to sustain a service from a university to paying to in a foreign currency, different different kinds of problems, but the the reality is that we don't have a good coverage of DOI. So, we are now working now know that from since 2 years ago and thanks to the ScaR funding, we developed better solution, which is an ARK an archival resource key implementation, which is decentralized in terms that we provide the infrastructure to the network in order to mint and resolve ARKs. And also to in this version two that we are working with this project, we will provide also metadata preservation. So, the idea is to extend the coverage and reach the metadata and then preserve the metadata um with this decentralized concept and this public good concept. Uh in this in this model, no one is the owner of the metadata and everyone can access to the metadata using this identifier as a key. Um and the other component is this data um data infrastructure. We we are working with Dataverse in order to build a regional Dataverse instance for orphan uh institutions. Institutions that don't have the capacity to build their own um their data repositories, but also at the same time make trainings for the curation process, which is the the proper possibility is the hardest part of building a data collection uh with the idea of data reuse. You need to make a lot of training in order to have a good curated collection and make the data truly um reusable. So, at the end we with this project, we are working on the this next area of La Referencia, expanding the coverage uh normalizing and enriching the metadata because the metadata, as you know, is not ready to make indicators and measures and things that can fit the research assessment process. We need change. We didn't make change ch- We need to change the process and to do that, we need to rely on uh metadata with better quality. So, there's a lot of things that we are doing and planning to make the metadata better for that use. And at the at the end the other third component is the multilingual problem. The multilingual thing is something that is is is for our region, but I I think that globally and now is more more more present in the in the everyday um uh research process that you find uh there are a lot of contents that are not in English. We in the past we were thinking that all the contents needs to be published in English to be visible, to be accessible, but the reality is that there's a lot of research results that are not in English and that are not going to be in English. If you think in the Chinese production only, there are generating a lot of good quality um research that is not going to be in English. So, building this um multilingual system based on this new or not new, but now seems to be very uh useful and near this large language models, not the conversion the conversational ones, but models that that can help us to build this multilingual retrieval um search and search engines in order to make any language uh scientific production for a production to be available and visible to any other uh researcher in in any other language. So, that's what we're trying to do with this cycle and this ecosystem. We want to aggregate, we want to normalize, and we want to add we are doing this persistent and data capacity layer with this multilingual recovery system as a as as the way to keep visibility and make the the contents of the repositories and and open journals to be truly available for the entire global community. So, at the end this is a cycle. This project it's it's a three-year project. We are now beginning with the the essential components and we will be publishing results and products that will be open for the entire global community. We will publish every 6 months. So, even the D Arc implementation will be available for other regions and countries to use and to build alternatives also compliant with the DDI's solutions. So, to for ending I don't know how I think that I am on the time. So, So, [clears throat] take aways repositories are not only the local deposit system. It should work as a connected network and they became part of the public infrastructure, but we need to work a lot in the coverage of those repositories. We need to work for these repositories needs to needs to have the very good coverage from the institutions research and that's not happening in in a lot of cases. So, we need to to work very hard on that. So, this federation model it's for us it was a was and it it still is a good model to that it scales very well for a regional initiative and for huge countries also. The multilingual thing is essential for this new area and so we are working very hard on that. And AI should be grounded in repositories. We need to work on how the repositories are struggling with the AI bots. And so we need to work very near uh, to this to this to this problem to be visible and to be part of the AI contents without uh, putting in risk our own infrastructure. So that's uh, a big issue uh, in this new area also. So and the finally the investment uh, should be shared to to be should be used it to to build shared capacity. We uh, strongly believe that when we receive funding is not for our operational regular uh, operational cost but to make to make the innovation and uh, and to improve the the ecosystem in the in the direction that we need to later uh, have a better sustainability uh, possibility. So uh, I will close with this. Uh, we trying to build the repositories this repository and non-commercial journals network. We share standards and as an infrastructure governed by the public as a public good. That's again our main message here. We are building public good. Knowledge and science should be a public good. So thank you very much. I I hope that it was most most less clear. It was very clear Latoro and uh, very interesting and that was an incredibly positive message to leave us on. Uh, and I'm full of admiration for the work you're doing. So thank you so much for sharing that with us. Um, I'm sure we'll have some questions about your presentation. Um, I'm just going to um, introduce you to Christie first though before we get to questions. Um, and then Kristy's going to share her screen, but um, Kristy has just like Latara had a most illustrious career. Um, she is um, a PhD individual. She is the director of the Galter Health and Sciences Library and Learning Center as I mentioned and also a professor of preventive medicine in biostatistics and informatics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Where she also serves as associate dean for knowledge management and strategy. Kristy is the director of informatics and data science for the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences (NUCATS) Institute leading efforts to strengthen research infrastructure and accelerate translational discovery and impact. Her work focuses on expanding access to information, advancing data-driven discovery, and modernizing how scientific knowledge is created, communicated, and assessed during rapid technological change. And she also serves along with Vicki Callan as the co-lead of the US Repository Network (USRN). And that's of course what she's going to be speaking about today. So Kristy, I will stop sharing and um, and pass the screen over to you. Really looking >> forward to you. Thank you. Wonderful, thank you. Can you see my screen? Okay. We can. Okay, wonderful. Well, thank you. It is such a pleasure and honor to join you today to share a little bit more about the US Repository Network. So, um, you know, we'd like to thank Jean and William for the invitation and um, and I very much enjoyed the previous presentation and I have my own set of questions actually. So, I'm looking forward to the discussion afterward. Um, so I'm joining you today in my role as the co-chair of the US Repository Network, um which we're going to call USRN. So, USRN is a community-led initiative supported by SPARC and COAR that aims to strengthen and connect US open research repositories as key components of our national research infrastructure. So, USRN starts from a shared understanding. Repositories are not just storage systems, but essential infrastructure for open, equitable, and reproducible scholarship. As this group knows, they play a central role in preserving research outputs and ensuring public access. And, um you know, most recently, we're really thinking about this in the context of federal open access policies. And I know that's something that other, um other countries have, um been faced with, um before the United States. And so, in the US, even though we're a bit behind, we're, um learning a lot as we begin to move through those, uh you know, through those processes. So, although the United States has a large and diverse repository ecosystem, it has historically lacked national coordination. And that is an understatement, to put it lightly. Um we're really grateful to the work that COAR has helped to shepherd, um in terms of identifying, um institutional silos and uneven practices as being the major barriers for creating a cohesive and interoperable network. Um it was that kind of conversation that really prompted the creation of the US Repository Network in partnership with SPARC. So, the US Repository Network supports US repositories in acting collectively at national and international levels. And USRN was designed as a lightweight and community-owned framework to support things like shared standards and good practices, capacity building and mutual learning, alignment with global repository initiatives and best practices, and then also that idea of scalable collaboration. How do you scale collaboration in a meaningful way without it becoming a silo or without having some kind of a centralized um structure in place? And as you can see from this slide, um there are over a thousand repositories that are already operating in institutional silos. Um organizations make choices about their repository technologies and their management uh for a wide variety of reasons. And so, I think, you know, having a way to help to coordinate those discussions in a manner that is mutually beneficial and that can drive um uh shared wins for the community is something that we're really excited about. So, um USRN defines uh US repositories broadly. Um so, it covers articles, data, gray literature, other kinds of emerging forms of scholarship. Um these repositories can be institution-based, they can be disciplinary, or they can be nonprofit-hosted. And we're also seeing representation from both um uh open-source and vendor platforms. Uh USRN is really working to bring the pieces of the puzzle together. So, finding ways to unite people, technology, standards, community and capacity-building strategy all into a single and hopefully cohesive conversation. Um and we really work to try and make this community something that's um open, that's inviting, um and that reflects the kinds of real challenges that people are faced with on a regular basis. So, um on this slide, I just want to highlight a a of folks. Um, the US Repository Network was launched again in as a coordinated effort between CORE and SPARC and just to highlight Kathleen and Heather here and their incredible leadership. Um, the inaugural co-leads for this network or co-chairs are Martha Whitehead um, at Harvard Library and Vicky Coleman who is at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Uh, Martha and Vicky really helped to launch and shepherd these initial conversations that I think helped people understand what's possible and why it is important that we're thinking and working together. Um, when Martha stepped back, um, I was really thrilled to be able to join Vicky in partnership um, as we're helping to uh, drive work forward for the US Repository Network. Um, I also want to give a shout out to Jennifer Beamer who is the visiting program officer for USRN and she is based at Cal State University in San Bernardino. And then also Carly Robinson who's a senior policy fellow at SPARC and Jennifer and Carly have really stepped up and been champions and collaborators and um, uh, it's just been really wonderful working with them. So, let's talk about the strategic vision. So, um, the strategic vision has really been a collaborative effort developed by repository folks from across the United States with input um, and excitement from everybody. Um, it's uh, emphasizes understandably interoperability and community ownership and positions repositories as active participants in transforming global scholarly communication. So, we're thinking at the global level um, and how we can create that infrastructure more so than the day-to-day local services. So, we're really trying to think about how do we take our work and make it um, uh, a a public good. How do we make it a shared win? Those types of things um, have been parts of deliberate conversations. Um, so in order to achieve this vision, um, we're leveraging several key objectives, which are outlined on this slide. So, we're working to provide a national voice for the distributed network of the US repositories. We're advocating for the role of a distributed network um, in uh, the context of national research infrastructure. We're working to strengthen this network in the United States, and then finally, we're looking to collaborate in the context of policy, um, but also collaborating with the individuals who are helping to drive those conversations um, in thinking about repositories as part of the fabric um, of how work gets done in the United States. So, vision is great, but the important thing is driving that vision to action. So, we're doing that you know, again with this idea of community and capacity building working together um, to drive um, toward uh, meaningful progress. Um, we uh, the USRN was launched with a steering group of library and repository leaders, um, and now we've really worked to try and open this up into a larger and um, more active conversation uh, moving forward. So, I'm going to talk about some of these key points of action in the upcoming slides. So, um, the first one that I want to highlight is um, a product that was developed by this collaboration um, uh, that basically outlines characteristics of digital publication repositories. Um it was published by SPARC. Um the link is at the bottom um of the slide. And these characteristics provide a shared framework for what it means for repositories to function as trustworthy, interoperable public infrastructure. And this is true particularly in the context of federal public access policy. Um I do think it's important to note that these characteristics are um described as desirable but not mandatory. Um and uh I would also highlight that the document um explicitly recognizes that many repositories don't yet meet um these goals. So, we're all on a journey. I know this group um understands that. We um you know, we're always driving toward a better place. Um but there is no end and so it's you know, having these um characteristics can actually help to serve as valuable mile markers or meter markers as we're um on our journey together. Um the document prioritizes feasibility, community guidance, and gradual improvement rather than compliance or enforcement. So, you can see some of the things that are listed here. These are I think um characteristics, attributes that um we would all agree are incredibly important. You know, the idea of free and easy discoverability and access um really is the baseline for the way we're thinking about these things. This idea of repositories providing open equitable access to publications and other research outputs, metadata, and doing so in a free manner uh really just helps to set the stage in a meaningful way um for what repositories can be as we think about them as national infrastructure. So, I would invite you to take a look at the report. Um it's really wonderful. I'm um glossing over it at a very high level, um but it's it's really represents um some wonderful work, and I think um a nice articulation of some of the um some of the things that we want to keep in front of us as we're shepherding this these conversations forward. Whether we're talking about USRN or any other groups, you know, it's it's good to have these remind ourselves, "Okay, here are some Let's keep this in mind. Let's always be driving toward these goals." Um another point of action is the discovery pilot project. So, the USRN launched a discovery pilot to assess and improve repository discoverability. Um this is particularly important given federal public access access policy requirements that emphasize repository deposit as a compliance uh pathway. The pilot evaluated real-world repository implementations and provided hands-on technical support, dashboards, and guidance to participating institution. Um so, it really took this work and went beyond recommendations and really tried to um provide um kind of that next level of action. Um this discovery pilot progra- uh project was launched in 2023, and it was completed in the 2024-25 year. Um it is represented by over 20 diverse US repositories um that participated, which you can see listed um at the bottom of the slide. It was led by CORE, so c o r e, with support from Antleaf, um and focused on metadata, uh OAI-PMH, PIDs, uh persistent identifiers, and also good practices. So, you know, the idea of a discovery pilot was important because it really reinforced these ideas that helped to reinforce the idea of repositories as a critical infrastructure. So, for instance, discoverability is absolutely critical for impact and compliance workflows. We also know, you know, all of us, we're all in this boat, that we often are using suboptimal technical practices. And so, how do we take things to the next level and you know, even have the conversations about what that can look like. And then finally, this idea of national scale discovery, you know, really trying to drive toward that goal of data reuse, access and reuse, requires coordination. It's not something that can be done, you know, by a single network or by a single platform. It's really, you know, we're all in this together. And I think the discovery pilot project was an important activity to help to drive toward that goal. So, you know, we saw that the results demonstrated the power of this coordination, really helped us think about what community-based interventions can look like. And then by starting to have conversations about basic technical barriers, the repository pilot helped us to expand what it means to have access to research outputs. And so, this is work that, you know, while the pilot has been wrapped up, this is work that continues to kind of percolate and drive toward progress. All right, another action point. And this is a has been a really fun one, which is we're thinking, you know, building this community so that we can think in meaningful ways about how we drive towards some of these lofty goals that I've uh highlighted um as um you know, as those markers or as those um spaces that we're driving toward. And that's engagement. So, we're really just trying to bring people together to have conversations, to build those connections, to build those conversations about how we're driving our work together um forward for common good. So, we've been having monthly community and capacity-building activities. You can see I've listed a few of these on this slide. Um where uh just um earlier this week earlier this week or last week we did one on ETDs. Um we've had conversations about persistent identifiers, AI bots, which is like a hassle for all of us. I know we're all kind of dealing with that in various uh ways. Um looking at compliance, accessibility compliance. Um even just the day-to-day management challenges of what it means to I mean, it's challenging, right? There's lots of different challenges. Um so, I think having that community of practice, um you know, your friends in the repository community that you can um learn from and share with really makes a big difference. Um one of the conversations that we had is this um GREI or G It's g r e i Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative. This is a program that's funded by the US National Institutes of Health and features seven different repository partners. Um so, repository infrastructure. Um I Our repository at my university is built on Invenio RDM, which is the software that powers Zenodo. Um so, we work on the Zenodo project, but Dataverse is also a par- participant as are many others. And we're coming together to look for opportunities where we can find common goals. So, things around metadata, persistent identifiers, common metrics, like those types of things that we can all agree we need to make progress toward to try and drive toward a more interoperable and sustainable ecosystem. And then each of our unique repositories can um innovate in ways that make sense for the for our communities and for our priorities. So, anyway, you can see these conversations, these monthly conversations have really tried to engage different spaces in the ecosystem and um you know, push a bit on how we're thinking about our work together. Um the last action item I want to mention is the core repository director directory. Um so, this repository directory provides a trusted global overview of the repository landscape. Um it's designed to solve, I think, what is a significant problem, which is that directories are outdated as the community evolves, which um it's uh always a challenge to try and keep up with things like that. Um responsibility for keeping records current is distributed to different community-based responsible organizations, um often at the national level. And so, this is an area where USRN has stepped up and we're working to make sure that the entries in the core repository directory um are um accurate and are as complete as possible. Um so, this is really, I think, um you know, helping to not only helping with quality at the at the local level in terms of representing the work that you and your teams are doing, but it also helps us be able to think about um national or international strategy because we understand um who the others are in this space and and maybe even some of the technical opportunities and challenges that they're faced with. So, um, so, uh, just to wrap things up, I want to, um, you know, thank you for your attention and for the opportunity to share USRN with you today. Um, our success depends on broad participation. So, we're really looking to engage people in a wide variety of ways. It's everything from sharing practices and expertise, um, to building sustainable, interoperable, and meaningful knowledge, uh, infrastructure together. So, um, we, um, encourage folks to reach out if they're interested in learning more. Um, there's a link there, and then of course, either Vicki or I, um, or anyone who has been working with USRN would be delighted to make the connection and help to, um, answer questions. So, with that, I'm going to stop sharing, and, um, pass the virtual microphone, uh, back to Jane. Thank you so much, Christie. Um, and Lautaro, and indeed William, you're very welcome to join us back in in the webinar room. Um, Christie, your enthusiasm absolutely shone through there. Um, and what you presented really sort of underscores such an enormous effort, and I feel what was really at the heart of your presentation was community. Um, very apparent to me, um, and, you know, that call out to anyone who's listening on the webinar to get in touch with Christie. Um, it sounds to me like it's a wonderful, um, project to be part of, and it also really underscores just how much work has gone into it, um, from my point of view. Um, please do, um, send us through some questions. Um, I know I've got some, but I don't want to hog the floor. Um, but um, perhaps I might just ask um, a question sort of from my own region because listening to both of you, Loterre and Christie, like it it's really impressive um, the work that you've, you know, produced and shared and made available to researchers everywhere. So, for a country like my own um, that doesn't have a national repository, um, I know you say we're all in this boat together, but some of us are sort of staring a little further ahead. Um, and some of the um, the desirable characteristics you shared, Christie, are like absolutely indisputable that, you know, they're all elements of this, you know, these projects and and and national repositories and infrastructure. But, for a country that doesn't have one, I mean, what would you sort of say? What are the absolute sort of core elements to get, you know, to get the party happening, so to speak? Because obviously there's, you know, there's policy, there's funding, there's expertise in the area. Like, what what do you In fact, what do you both sort of feel were those sort of um, underpinning elements which really push things along and made this work happen for you? Loterre, do you would you like to go first? Sorry, my my connection is is is glitching. Uh, can you repeat the last part, please, Jane? Um, I think I was just saying if you had to say like what were the the main triggers that really gave you the impetus to do this piece of work. So, for for example, for a country like my own that doesn't have a national repository, you know, I can think that there's, you know, policy conversations and there's funding and there's expertise, but, you know, what sort of really brought it together and actually sort of engendered, you know, and you know, and sort of really birthed these projects? So, thank you. Thank you. Th- Thank you and sorry for um for us as a region, you you know that we are we are a regional, so that discussion of a national initiative is something that that happens inside every country and depends a lot on the national policies. But, for example, participating of of network of international networks it's also helps to bring the discussion into the national uh scope and also to uh to help national authorities to note that they need to work on national policies. And as part of the national policies, they need to develop some kind of internal repository network. Uh of course, it's hard sometimes it's hard to to explain how important the repositories are because there's no other uh kind of infrastructure that will help in this preservation and to preserve the memory, the research memory of an institution as a as an individual institution, but also contribute and can build and be visible at national to participate of this kind of network is something that is important for institutions, but also for the national infrastructure in order to bring all the content that's that are not and not uh oftenly part of the mainstream because you can have thesis and part of the research and the and the education um contents that you are using and and delivering to your students and the professors. So, it's part of the research uh strategy the of the education strategy of a country to have those all those resource in a single place to for you to find but also interoperate with other external networks in order to make that be silver to the global uh to the global ecosystem and that gives you more visibility, more citation so I I can I can go on mentioning things that are good but I don't want to talk too much so I Thank you Lotte. You see? I will just jump in and say, you know, looking for um common challenges I think can be a really nice way to um to work together um and scope a problem. So, um one of the things I put the link in the chat just because um this generalist repository project did just that. We have commercial partners, we have open source partners, we've got like very different motivations, shall we say, in terms of why it is we're coming together. But what could we agree on? Well, we all know we want our stuff to be discoverable. We know that we want to try and do best practices with respect to um you know, like metrics and reporting. Like how are things counted? Um you know, and those are not really controversial. They're not part of a business model. And so, you know, we could come together. Um I think it's similar in um you know, you look at groups like open repositories. I see a lot of those, you know, kind of communities where we're coming together on shared challenges or shared opportunities. Um I one thing that I do think is um useful when thinking about scoping a problem. So, I'm going to put um there's a link we've got this again I'm uh you know, I know this is a little bit different than institutional repositories, but just thinking generalist repositories are part of the repository ecosystem. And Lautaro Lautaro, you mentioned when things are deposited in other spaces, how do you find you know, like how do you get them? And you know, and I think that that's the kind of um common challenge that we are all faced with. So, how do we make those outputs discoverable, you know, so that we're not having these silos where things get buried. And um uh you know, so that's driven some of this work. And I put a link in because we've got some documents that we've tried to work together on that to try and surface things. Um the other thing, and this actually is a question that I had about uh La Referencia is um discovery. You know, as you're having your um as your materials or outputs that are important to your network are placed in these other spaces, are there opportunities for more broad discoverability? Or how are you managing discovery across this distributed network? Um I'd be very interested in that. We're thinking about this from a collaborative >> I I can I can try to explain. What we do is first we we have these national nodes using our aggregator software. And they build a national portal uh by harvesting their own repositories. And then they're are also building a collection, and we use open uh pre at least guidelines in order to align vocabularies and ways to, of course, uh determine that if something is some content is open access or not. We are focused on open access and embargo. So, at the end you build this national and that's a window. That that's a a place where you can discover the content, but then we harvest the national node and we build this this regional portal. Uh then so [snorts] so we can go there and find also at that level. But also we are we build an interoperable OAI-PMH collection for the entire region and for example OpenAIRE is harvesting us. So, at the end you have several different windows where you can find and discover our contents via interop and we build us that by interoperating our metadata. But at the end when you click in at in any window, you go to the repository. So, at the end you are given visibility to the repository. Not it's not important and we don't focus on which window yeah or which site or what which with which will be your entry point. The important thing is to make this visible in as many sites or or or portals as possible. And and and and in talking about discoverability and visibility, this multilingual thing is something important because most of the system today in any if you go to any place and you for example, if you go to to a repository or a portal and you search for example in Japanese or in Arabic or even in Spanish over the contents that you have, you will most of the time if if the if the language is different enough, you will have zero results because all the recovery systems works related to a particular language or a couple of languages. So, you are keeping out other cultures, other other languages out of your discovery system, and you are creating silos. We We work together with CORE, and we did a an article about multilingual search uh last year, and it's published there. And it there has It has a lot of as it goes. So, you can go for deeper in that, but that is important part of the global ecosystem. We need to work for multilingual visibility. Thank you, Lauchlan. Yeah. Um I I've got one question in that's come through in the chat, and it's for Christian. Um I'll pose it now, cuz we're almost out of time. So, Christian, when you're talking about interoperability across institutions, what are the biggest gaps you're still seeing in how research outputs are actually discovered and reused? And who do you think is best placed to close those gaps? That is the million-dollar question, I think. It's [laughter] very complicated. I think um what I I I think there are lots of challenges here, um but one that I have been thinking a lot about is actually just yeah, the completeness and quality of metadata that is available. Um you know, so it um it allows, I think, to be able to support these questions like discoverability, but also interoperability if you have the context of the content that is included. Um also the and being able to have those um it this includes links to related materials. You know, reuse isn't just about uh a table of data. It's about, you know, it requires so much more in order to be able to take take that forward. I think at the risk of saying something controversial, I'm going to say that I think artificial intelligence, so especially generative AI approaches to being able to at least contemplate new workflows to support missing metadata. I think it's opening up a new world so that we can focus on different kinds of problem. There's There's enough problems to go around. So, if we can find ways to help ourselves get over some of these humps, I'm excited about that. But I I think it's the repositories, it's the repository teams that are going to be responsible for working together to make that happen. Thanks so much. Chrissy, I think you answered a very difficult question very well. Just one final question for Lautaro. Lautaro, how does the reference ensure its sustainability? Okay. Uh for our operational and regular operational cost, we rely on the countries contribution. We have this agreement between countries. So, the national ministries, they uh support like a year fee for us. So, we pay like a very basic and uh most of our existence was funded uh by the that contribution that is not huge. It's a a small amount of money and we did like a magic to make the the network with touch in the past years. Recently, we had uh thanks to Escoss to we have we are part of the Escoss family, and thanks to Escoss, we had uh some contributions to develop some concrete components like a new usage statistics uh ecosystem and this D Arc uh one version which is working in Brazil. Uh now we have this investing open infrastructures project that we will run uh the next 3 years, and hopefully, we will build a lot of component also for the global infrastructure, and we have this Lera- Lera C's projects for supporting this space. But, it's important for me to say that again, we used that funding not for supporting our regular uh operational cost, but to development or improvement and helping the different part of the ecosystem. Uh we need to survive without that. So, we don't use that as a part of our sustainability strategy. Uh and again, we are building public goods, so we need to have support from the public uh funding. Uh that's that's we that's part of the game. Well, and long long may continue Lautaro. Thank you so much for that, and and wishing you all the best in that future sustainability.