Latin America could become a world leader in non-commercial open science

To meet the challenges of the next century — from pandemics and climate change to automation and big data — science needs to be open to all. Citizens must be equipped with the same access to information as researchers, and scientists need the opportunity to use high-quality, interconnected repositories of knowledge to advance our understanding of the world around us. These are among the guiding principles of the open science movement. 

Sustainability and inclusion are vital to open science, and can be fostered by shared practices, infrastructure, and financing models which guarantee the equitable participation of scientists from less-favoured institutions and countries in the pursuit of knowledge and development.

We need to guarantee that the benefits of science are shared between scientists and the general public, without restriction. But how do we achieve this? Part of the answer lies in building national scientific systems capable of sharing and enhancing a diversity of knowledge.

The birth of CRIS

One of the main obstacles standing in the way of open science is a lack of integration between existing databases — such as public libraries, government datasets, and university archives — which were built at different times using varied systems, and which have no links to one another.

For example, institutional repositories — which grew out of the effort of librarians over generations — are usually disconnected from curriculum databases. They don’t have identifiers or...