The National Education and Research Network (RNP) signed the term of adhesion to the cooperation agreement of the National Consortium for Open Science (CoNCienciA), which establishes technical and operational cooperation bases aimed at promoting activities to encourage the practice of Open Science.  

CoNCiencia was released in March of this year by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). The initiative is the result of a commitment between CNPq, the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (Ibict), the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) and the Brazilian Center for Physical Research (CBPF), which was established during the execution of Milestone 5 of Commitment 3 of the 4th National Action Plan on Open Government. The item involves articulation with development agencies for the implementation of actions to support Open Science, with the objective of establishing scientific data governance mechanisms for the advancement of open science in Brazil.  

In order to support the repositories of these institutions by providing the service of assignment of perennial identifiers, with international visibility to the deposited data sets, the CNPq established an agreement with DataCite, the international organization that generates the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for Research Data. From this agreement, the Consortium was formed where, under the management of CNPq, institutions that have their own repositories can be included.  

In this context, RNP signed, still in 2021, a technical cooperation term with IBICT and CNPq to carry out the planning and implementation of research and development (R&D) actions and knowledge transfer related to the incubation of research data repositories and the construction of a federation of research data repositories. In this cooperation, it has already carried out the incubation of four institutions (Federal University of Goiás (UFG), Federal Rural University of Amazonas (UFRA), Federal University of Ceará (UFC) and the Brazilian Center for Physical Research (CBPF)) to build and foster their own repositories and prepare them to join the consortium. 

“The formalization of RNP to CoNCIenciA reinforces our joint action between the main national institutions and the Open Science movement in the country”, says Gustavo Dias, manager of Research, Development and Innovation at RNP. “Since 2018, we have been involved in important initiatives in the field of open research data in order to raise awareness and encourage more institutions to be part of this movement”.  

In addition to RNP, which is preparing to implement its own research data repository in 2024, Ibict, Fiocruz, Embrapa and CBPF are already participating in this major national mobilization for the implementation of their repositories.