2026-10-27 –, Naturalis 01
Chile has no funder mandate requiring persistent identifiers. Adoption is happening anyway, driven by an intermediary institution rather than by top-down regulation. Data Observatory, a public-private-academic foundation, leads Chile's DataCite consortium. Its early members are not only universities: the Library of the National Congress now assigns DOIs to legislative and parliamentary documents, extending persistent identification beyond research data into the public record itself.
This session traces that path: how a national FAIR data strategy, a shared consortium, a national CODATA committee and a regional alliance (SURDATA) were assembled without a mandate and without the funding assumptions the global PID infrastructure takes for granted. We discuss what worked, what did not, and what the international PID community may be missing when it designs for contexts that already have mandates, budgets and institutional density.
Most accounts of successful PID adoption start with a mandate: a funder, a ministry or a national library requires identifiers, and infrastructure follows. Chile did not have that starting point. What it had instead was an intermediary willing to absorb the cost, the coordination burden and the institutional risk of being first.
Data Observatory is a foundation co-founded by the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Science, Amazon Web Services and Universidad Adolfo Ibanez. It operates as a neutral convening space between the state, academia and industry, which turned out to matter more for PID adoption than any technical capability. This talk presents four connected pieces of work and what each one taught us.
First, the DataCite consortium. Data Observatory leads Chile's consortium and onboards member institutions. Universidad de los Andes came first, which was expected. The Library of the National Congress came second, which was not. A parliamentary library assigning DOIs to legislative documents pushes persistent identification out of the research domain and into the public record. We will discuss what that unlocked, and the metadata and governance questions it raised that the research-data model does not answer cleanly.
Second, the Data Observatory data catalogue. A working catalogue is where abstract FAIR commitments meet the actual state of national data: inconsistent metadata, unclear custodianship, datasets nobody is willing to own. We will be candid about what remains unresolved.
Third, public policy. Chile is developing a national strategy for FAIR data, and Data Observatory has submitted technical observations on draft legislation concerning data governance and management. This is the part rarely discussed at PID conferences: the window in which identifiers can be written into law is narrow, opens without warning, and closes whether or not the technical community showed up. We will describe how we tried to be present when it opened.
Fourth, community. The National CODATA Committee and the SURDATA Alliance, a regional network for open and responsible data from the Global South, are attempts to convert isolated institutional wins into something that survives a change of government. SURDATA in particular is built on the premise that Latin American institutions should not each negotiate their relationship with global PID infrastructure alone.
Running through all four is a question we would like to leave with this community. The global PID infrastructure is excellent, and it was designed under assumptions, about membership fees in hard currency, about institutional scale, about who sits on governance bodies, that do not travel neutrally. Adoption in our region is not slowed by scepticism about DOIs. It is slowed by the cost of entry, the absence of local technical capacity and the perception that identifiers are an academic luxury rather than public infrastructure.
The session is deliberately practical. Attendees working on national or regional adoption should leave with a transferable model, and attendees who build PID infrastructure should leave with a clearer picture of what adoption costs at the receiving end.
Executive Director of Data Observatory and signed the consortium agreements described in this proposal, so the material is first-hand rather than reported.