Evaluation of the visibility and interoperability of the institutional repositories of Central America and Mexico

This work evaluates the number of repositories from Central America and Mexico integrated to OpenDoar and the visibility by integrating their metadata in various collectors and directories. The document provides the process for collecting data from each of the records of the repositories in OpenDoar, identifying 77 institutional and disciplinary repositories. The verification of the URL was carried out to ensure the extraction of the data in an automated way using a web scraping algorithm created in the R language. To evaluate the visibility and interoperability, 10 platforms were selected between collectors and directories, extracting the number of documents from each repositories integrated into them.The study revealed that Mexico is the country with the most repositories integrated in OpenDoar with 42. 80% of the repositories used the software, Dspace and Eprints, 12 of these repositories are not interoperable with other platforms. The most used platform to integrate data is Google Scholar with 48.7% of the total documents in the repositories. 84.4% of the repositories meet the basic visibility criteria, but only 24 are integrated into six or more platforms, showing a low contribution to their visibility. The Repository of the Technological University of Panama is the only one integrated in the 10 platforms.Recommendations are made to generate a strategy to improve visibility by integrating repositories in the most common directories such as OpenDoar and also in metadata collectors such as BASE or CORE.