The Institutional Repository for Information Sharing – PAHO IRIS has the mission to organize, disseminate and preserve scientific and technical information generated by the Pan-American Health Organization, including its headquarters (Washington, D.C.), Country Offices, and Pan American Centers. This platform is also aligned to the WHO global strategy to preserve and give access to its information assets in health sciences, together with other Regional Offices.
PAHO IRIS comprises all Mandates of the Directing Council (Executive Committee, Board of Directors, and Pan American Sanitary Conference), scientific and technical publications, progress and technical meeting reports, in addition to all articles published in the Pan American Journal of Public Health.
With the progressive consolidation of PAHO IRIS, it is expected that this Institutional Repository can integrate with other repositories in a way it can foster exchange of information. The first step was taken in cooperation with BIREME to integrate PAHO IRIS as a source of information in the Virtual Health Library (VHL). The next step will be to integrate it also to the WHO Global IRIS. As of today, PAHO IRIS is one of the sources of information to be retrieved at the VHL, through a direct link.
VHL is a model of information organization developed in a collaborative manner by BIREME, with 35 databases and reaching more than 26 million records. The IRIS incorporation into the VHL will enrich it with the scientific output of the Organization.
“In recent years, BIREME has intensified its work in data exchange using open interoperability standards. PAHO Institutional Repository follows these standards and having PAHO IRIS information integrated to the VHL is a great accomplishment. In addition to expanding visibility of PAHO intellectual production, it adds value to the VHL by recovering this relevant information in an integrated manner with the international and regional scientific and technical literature, together with Medline and LILACS databases, respectively”, stated Renato Murasaki, Manager of Information Technologies and Methodologies at BIREME.
According to Eliane Santos, PAHO Regional Advisor and PAHO IRIS Coordinator, “this is one more step towards the consolidation of PAHO Institutional Repository; bringing together the new (new publications) and the history. Not only can the Organization dive into its own history, but also demonstrate its important contribution to Health in the Region, in almost 115 years from its inception (to be celebrated in December 2017). It also means the effective integration of the Headquarters production with the relevant scientific production developed by country offices and centers at national and sub-regional levels.”