From: Kathleen Shearer <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2015 09:19:51 +0200

Open Access in Latin America: A paragon for the rest of the world

August 17, 2015

Latin America is one of the world’s most progressive regions in terms
of open access and adoption of sustainable, cooperative models for
disseminating research; models that ensure that researchers and
citizens have access to the results of research conducted in their
region.

SciELO is a remarkable decentralized publishing platform harboring
over 1,200 peer-reviewed journals from fifteen countries located in
four continents - South America. Central-North America, Europe and
Africa. Redalyc, based in Mexico, is another extraordinary system
hosting almost 1,000 journals from fourteen Latin American countries
plus Spain and Portugal. Governments around the world spend billions
of dollars on infrastructure to support research excellence; platforms
such as SciELO and Redalyc are extensions of this much larger
investments in research. They reflect an enlightened understanding in
Latin America that the wide dissemination of and access to research
results is as important as the research itself. The rest of the world
would do well to take note.

In a recent blog post, these two initiatives were discredited by
Jeffrey Beall. In the post, Beall compared the two publishing
platforms to favelas, resulting in a mean-spirited insult to both
favela dwellers on the one hand, and SciELO and Redalyc on the other.
Rather than maligning these initiatives, they should be held up as
examples of best practice for the rest of the world.

Furthermore, just because some in North America do not know about
SciELO and Redalyc does not render them irrelevant. This is an
extremely elitist and narrow view of the world. Although these
platforms may not be well known in some places, SciELO and Redalyc do
raise the visibility and accessibility of the journals they host,
particularly with their local communities. If these journals were
published by the big commercial publishers, the vast majority of
researchers in Latin America would simply not have access to the
articles in those journals. What value is visibility, if people cannot
access the articles?

One of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which were
finalized on August 1, 2015, is to “Build resilient infrastructure,
promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster
innovation”. Both Scielo and Redalyc are excellent exemplars of this
type of infrastructure. These types of networked meta-publishers allow
for central governance of policies, procedures and controls, but are
intentionally decentralized to support the development of local
capacity and infrastructure ensuring greater sustainability and
alignment with local policies and priorities. What Beall advocates
for, namely to let powerful foreign players come in and take over
local capacity building, is exactly the opposite of what sustainable
development is about.

For these reasons, we believe that SciELO and Redalyc are very nice
neighbourhoods indeed!

Signed by,

Juan Pablo Alperin, Public Knowledge Project and Simon Fraser University, Canada

Dominique Babini, CLACSO, Argentina

Leslie Chan, University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada

Eve Gray, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Jean-Claude Guédon, University of Montréal, Canada

Heather Joseph, SPARC, United States

Eloy Rodrigues, University of Minho, Portugal

Kathleen Shearer, COAR, Canada/Germany

Hebe Vessuri, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and Instituto
Patagónico de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas, Argentina