A few years ago, I was working quietly in my university library, helping researchers manage their publications, metadata, and institutional repository. It was important work, but often felt like maintenance—keeping the wheels of academia turning, not reshaping where they were headed.
Then, during a training on Open Science, someone mentioned something in passing: persistent identifiers. I nodded along, pretending to know what they were talking about. DOIs, ORCIDs, ARKs... just technical codes, right?
But something stuck. I started digging.
What I found was eye-opening.
Persistent identifiers weren’t just digital labels. They were the silent architecture of recognition—determining what counts as science, who gets credited, which institutions are visible, and which voices get lost. They shape how knowledge circulates, and more importantly, how it doesn’t.
In the Global South, we often do the work, but not always with the infrastructure. We rely on systems built elsewhere, with priorities that aren’t always ours. That realization lit a fire in me. If we want fair, inclusive scholarly communication, we can’t just upload our articles—we have to question who assigns the identifiers and under what terms.
That’s how I began my journey into building decentralized, sovereign PID systems for Latin America. It’s not flashy work. But it’s deeply political. And transformative.
Because until we fix the pipes, knowledge will keep flowing in only one direction.
If this resonated with you -and you speak spanish-, I invite you to read more in a new open-access book just published by CLACSO this week. It features my chapter, "Identificadores persistentes: el talón de Aquiles de la ciencia abierta", where I dive deeper into how control over identifiers shapes the geopolitics of knowledge. You can access the full book here: https://libreria.clacso.org/publicacion.php?p=4470&c=2
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