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OA in Latin America: a Global South Paradigm
In the age of the internationalization of research brought on by the internet and digital scholarship, the movement for open and accessible research has not yet coalesced into a single model. The dominant open access paradigm proposed by the global North has its flaws, and while other paradigms still exist it is valuable to look to them for different potential solutions to problems like the consolidation of resources by for-profit companies like Elsevier. One of these paradigms that present other possibilities for a global scholarly ecosystem has developed in Latin America.
The Latin American paradigm of open access is most prominently defined by the expectation that research produced with public funds is a common good and should never be commercialized. This is especially important since much of the research in the region is funded at least partially by public universities, governments, or regional councils like CLACSO (the Latin American Council on Social Sciences). Most scholarly publishing is done at the institutional level as part of the regular budget, and shared freely with other institutions without the involvement of for-profit third-party entities. Other characteristics of the Latin American paradigm include:
A preference for CC BY-NC-SA licenses to reflect the ideally non-commercial nature of scholarly publications rather than the CC BY license preferred in the global North
Adherence to the values put forth in the 2017 Declaration of Mexico rather than the Berlin Declaration (2003), Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) or Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003)
APCs are uncommon in open access publishing
Traditional scholarly genres such as the essay, article and monograph are being (unevenly) collapsed into a single “paper” genre modeled after a scientific report
In spite of these differences, the challenges that open access initiatives in Latin America face are much the same as in the North. The dominance of metrics such as journal impact factor, the resulting reliance on subscription services like WoS and Scopus and tendency to favor traditional prestige journals, as well as a lack of solidarity and policy at the regional level are some of the major problems threatening the open initiatives that have so far been successful in Latin America. If these problems are not addressed, some regional scholars believe that the current system will cease to be sustainable (Aguado López et al. 2019).
There are a number of important non-commercial platforms that have grown out of the Latin American open access movement, several of which are summarized below:
SciELO: an open access database and digital publishing model originating in Brazil in 1998. Among the earliest of these platforms, always viewed OA as an integral part of digital journal publishing and focuses largely on health sciences and social sciences (Packer 2020)
Latindex: A comprehensive directory of Spanish-language journals maintained since 1997 and based at UNAM
CLACSO: An international non-profit associated with UNESCO and established in 1967, the largest global network of social science and humanities research. Funds social research, and promotes open access through publishing, maintaining a digital repository, and developing regional policy recommendations
Redalyc: Database and digital library for open access journals
LA Referencia: A database pulling metadata from regional open access institutional repositories
AmeliCA: “a community-based regional infrastructure” (Becerril García et al. 2018) initiative to strengthen non-profit publishing models with projects including an XML markup system, professionalization for publishers, and proposed “responsible metrics”
One of the main solutions proposed by Latin American scholars for the current crises in the global scholarly communications system is rooted in reassessing how research is evaluated (Becerril García et al. 2018, Aguado López et al. 2019, Packer 2020). This would entail stopping the use of traditional metrics such as journal impact factors and h-index, with the goal of reorienting evaluation systems away from what is considered relevant and important to the global North and back towards what is deemed important research regionally and locally. The argument here is that while research should be made public in the best interest of the global scientific community, it must be guided and evaluated by the best interest of a local or regional community. To this end, non-commercial institutional publishing operations should be strengthened in order to combat the for-profit publishing model.
Aguado-López, E., Becerril-García, A., & Chávez-Ávila, S. (2019). Reflexión sobre la publicación académica y el acceso abierto a partir de la experiencia de RedALyC. Palabra Clave (La Plata), 8(2), e067. https://doi.org/10.24215/18539912e067
Babini, D. (2020). Toward a Global Open-Access Scholarly Communications System: A Developing Region Perspective. In M. P. Eve & J. Gray (Eds.), Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Babini, D., & Rovelli, L. (2020). Tendencias recientes en las políticas científicas de ciencia abierta y acceso abierto en Iberoamérica. CLACSO. http://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/clacso/se/20201120010908/Ciencia-Abierta.pdf
Becerril García, A., Aguado López, E., Batthyány, K., Melero, R., Beigel, F., Vélez Cuartas, G., Banzato, G., Rozemblum, C., Amescua García, C., Gallardo, O., & Torres, J. (2018). AmeliCA: A community-driven sustainable framework for Open Knowledge in Latin America and the Global South. Redalyc, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, CLACSO, Universidad Nacional de La Plata y Universidad de Antioquia. http://sedici.unlp.edu.ar/handle/10915/90958
Packer, A. L. (2020). The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of SciELO. In Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4933/chapter/625177/The-Pasts-Presents-and-Futures-of-SciELO
I, Sara Kittleson, have neither given nor received aid while working on this assignment. I have completed the graded portion BEFORE looking at anyone else's work on this assignment.
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