COAR Latin America - CLARA, COLABORA and COAR join forces

["Mueller, Katharina" <katharina.mueller@sub.uni-goettingen.de>]

** Apologies for Cross-posting **

Building up COAR Latin America - CLARA, COLABORA and COAR join 
forces to develop collaboration of Open Access repositories

16 June 2011 - The Confederation of Open Access Repositories 
(COAR), an international association of repository initiatives, 
is reaching out to develop its activities in Latin America. As a 
first step, at the BIREDIAL conference in Bogota1, Colombia on 
May 9-11, 2011, representatives of COAR, the Latin American 
organization RedCLARA and the network of CoLaBoRa signed a 
Memorandum of Understanding committed to establishing a regional 
branch of COAR. Within the worldwide structure of COAR, this 
regional approach will build upon existing Open Access activities 
in Latin America and encourage and support the development of new 
initiatives. At the same time, the new distributed network 
structure recognizes the national and regional legal, 
organizational, cultural, language and communication challenges.

This regional initiative will be coordinated by CoLaBoRa through 
its network of national contacts and in close collaboration with 
RedCLARA and the COAR office.

Florencio Utreras, Executive Director of RedCLARA, and Malgorzata 
Lisowska, Executive Director of CoLaBoRa note: "This 
collaboration within the framework of COAR is a great opportunity 
to extend our network of expertise and use this sharing of 
knowledge and strategies to further the developments in Latin 
America." Norbert Lossau, chairperson of COAR, adds: "We are 
looking forward to close beneficial relationships and activities 
with our colleagues from Latin America. This will strengthen our 
common goal to improve global visibility of research outputs 
through networks of Open Access repositories."

  About COAR

COAR, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories, is a young 
association of repository initiatives launched in October 2009, 
uniting over 80 members and partners from 24 countries from 
throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia, and North America. Its 
mission is to enhance greater visibility and application of 
research outputs through global networks of Open Access digital 
repositories. More information about COAR and its members is 
available at the COAR web site <http://www.coar-repositories.org>.

About CLARA

CLARA, Cooperacion Latino Americana de Redes Avanzadas (Latin 
American Cooperation of Advanced Networks), is a non-profit 
organization whose legal foundation dates back to December 2004, 
uniting 17 Latin American countries. The CLARA vision is to serve 
as a Latin American collaboration system by means of 
telecommunications-advanced networks for research, innovation and 
education. CLARA develops and operates RedCLARA, the advanced 
internet network that was established in Latin America for 
regional interconnection and linked to the European GEANT2 
network. More information is available at www.redclara.net/.