From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2016 20:58:20 +0000

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Open access advocates in Europe are becoming increasingly concerned that OA
is in danger of being appropriated by publishers, and in a way that will see
the "publishing oligopoly" maintain an unhealthy grip on scholarly
communication. Amongst other things, they worry, it will allow legacy
publishers to continue charging the research community excessive fees for
the services they provide.

Keen to find alternative models, some have been casting jealous eyes on the
Global South and pointing to Latin American initiatives like SciELO and
Redalyc. Both these services started out as online bibliographic databases,
but over time have added more and more freely-available full-text content
from regional journals. Today SciELO hosts 573,525 research articles from
1,249 journals. Redalyc has more than 425,000 full-text articles from over
1,000 journals.

But does Western Europe need to look as far afield as Latin America for this
kind of model? The Moscow-based CyberLeninka, for instance, reports that it
currently hosts 940,000 papers from 990 regional journals, all of which are
open access, and approximately 70% of which are available under a CC BY
licence. And it has amassed this content in just three years.

Moreover, CyberLeninka has achieved this without the support of either the
Russian government, or any private venture capital, as Chief Strategy
Officer at CyberLeninka Mikhail Sergeev explains in a Q&A. Rather, the
service was created, and is maintained, by just five people working from
home. The goal: to create a prototype for a Russian open science
infrastructure.

But could CyberLeninka be developing a solution that the West could learn
from?

The Q&A with Sergeev can be access here:

http://poynder.blogspot.ru/2016/01/the-oa-interviews-mikhail-sergeev-chief.html