Invest in Open Infrastructure supports LA Referencia and the dARK initiative

[This post is based on the recent IOI announcement.]

Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) announced in November 2025 that LA Referencia is one of the inaugural winners of the IOI Network Adoption Fund. It will receive up to US$1.5M in funding to advance adoption of open infrastructure and strengthen regional research ecosystems. IOI will also provide ongoing implementation support for governance, community engagement, financial and business models, ensuring the resilience and long-term impact.

LA Referencia, which is the Latin America + Spain Open Science Network, operates a regional aggregation and discovery platform that currently connects 10 countries, collecting and preserving research information from national repositories in each member country. Key elements of the proposed project include:

Expand services to include 10 additional Latin American countries, fostering new member countries and strengthening a more inclusive and equitable regional network.
Implement a decentralized persistent identifier system (dARK) – currently working at IBICT (Brazil) with ARK identifiers and green blockchain technology – to ensure that research outputs and metadata remain permanently accessible and verifiable, even in the event of local system failures.
Upgrade to an LLM-powered multilingual semantic search system capable of discovering research across languages and connecting scholarly work beyond linguistic barriers, combined with advanced metadata enrichment to enable new metrics and more transparent and diverse approaches to regional research assessment.
Create a regional Dataverse repository for orphan datasets and expand training and translation programs to help institutions use Dataverse effectively.

ARK Alliance

Invest in Open Infrastructure supports LA Referencia and the dARK initiative

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