| Votes | By | Price | Discipline | Year Launched |
| La Referencia | FREE | Interdisciplinary |
La Referencia is a regional open-access network that aggregates and connects research outputs from national repositories across Latin America. It serves as a unified discovery platform for scientific publications, theses, datasets, and institutional outputs produced in the region.
What La Referencia Offers
- A federated search portal covering multiple national repositories
- Access to open-access articles, theses, conference papers, and research datasets
- Standardised metadata through regional and international interoperability standards
- Support for national open-science policies and research visibility
- A collective regional governance model involving education and science ministries
Why It’s Useful for Scientific Research
1. Strengthens regional visibility
Many Latin American institutions produce valuable research that is under-indexed in global platforms.
La Referencia provides regional amplification and makes outputs discoverable internationally.
2. Supports open-science mandates
Countries in the network coordinate open-access policy, infrastructure, and metadata standards—making it easier for researchers to comply with requirements.
3. Provides a rich resource for comparative and multidisciplinary studies
Fields such as:
- Environment
- Agriculture
- Social sciences
- Public health
- Education
- Climate and biodiversity
benefit from access to region-specific research not easily found elsewhere.
4. Enables cross-country collaboration
By aggregating national repositories, it helps researchers identify regional partners and complementary work.
Strengths
- Deep coverage of Latin American research outputs
- Fully open-access and interoperable
- Standardised metadata for reliable discovery
- Backed by national education and science agencies
- A major contributor to the global open-science movement
Limitations
- Coverage varies by country depending on repository maturity
- Some metadata can be inconsistent or incomplete
- Not a full-service bibliographic database—primarily a discovery layer
- English-language indexing is weaker than global platforms