Latin American researchers participated in the conference "Challenges Toward Open Science and Open Education," organized by the Mercosur DAI Network and the UNR.

Open science is a set of practices that make scientific research in any field accessible to everyone, transparent, and collaborative, for the benefit of scientists and society as a whole. From this perspective, work is carried out with open access, equipment, and laboratories, as well as with citizen participation.

This topic was discussed at the Conference "Challenges towards Open Science and Open Education" organized by the Mercosur DAI Network (Open Research Data) and the Open Access Management Unit of the Cabinet Coordination, at the government headquarters of the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, on June 5th.

This is the third meeting of this Network, which was formed two years ago at the initiative of researchers from the University of the Republic, Uruguay; the University of the State of Santa Catarina, Brazil; and the Universidad Nacional de Rosario"In these difficult times for the public university and science, these spaces are a source of support and struggle," said Ana Casali, UNR Coordinator of the DAI Network.

The truth is that the Latin American community has been working on open educational resources for ten years, with the goal of storing them properly and making them available to society, enabling their use and recycling, with appropriate metadata and licenses. They then saw the need to move toward open research data.

These are defined as freely accessible data that can be reused, remixed, and redistributed for different purposes, especially academic research and teaching. "Openly sharing data facilitates its examination, provides the basis for reproducing and verifying research, and paves the way for promoting collaboration," the researcher stated.

For these data to fulfill this virtuous cycle, they must follow the FAIR principles: they must be discoverable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. Discoverable means they must have a persistent ID, they must not be lost, and they must have rich, high-quality metadata so that others can use them. Accessible refers to open, free, and standardized protocols. Interoperable refers to a regulated vocabulary so that they can be easily found. Reusable implies the use of appropriate licenses for these data.