The Latin American Open Archives Portal (LAOAP) is a project to build a scholars’ portal at the Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC) to improve access to social sciences grey literature produced in Latin America. LAOAP will include working documents, preprints, research papers, statistical documents, and other difficult-to-access materials published by research institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and peripheral agencies, and that are not controlled by commercial publishers.

LAOAP utilizes the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), a low-barrier solution to disseminate and share digital content over the Web. LAOAP provides digital repositories with tools and training to “expose” their metadata—the standardized information describing the research materials—for “harvesting” by the OAI service provider site at LANIC. LAOAP also provides access to the digitized materials through the Open Archives scholars’ portal, and develops specialized searching services for the Latin Americanist social sciences research community.

Leading partners of LAOAP are Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales-Chile (FLACSO-Chile) and Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA).

For further information, contact LARRP.