In Latin America, two thirds of the investments and Funding for Open Access initiatives and Research & Development (R&D) comes, directly or indirectly, from public funds and from international cooperation. Key Open Access players are national science agencies and universities (mainly libraries, journal editors, press units, ICT units, research/academic areas).

The region has a long tradition of regional information networking to provide Open Access to its research results, in regional subject repositories that started with bibliographic records in the 80's and now extend to added full-texts; as well as in multi disciplinary regional peer-reviewed journal portals and digital repositories developed since the end of the 90's. These are the most important contributions from the region to Open Access implementation, together with a regional declaration on Open Access (Bahia 2005) and an Open Access national legislation that mandates deposit of State funded research results in Open Access digital repositories (approved in Agentina and Peru in 2013; in Mexico in 2014; and bill introduced in Congress in Brazil in 2007/reintroduced in 2011).

In the absence of commercial academic publishers, which is the model prevailing in developed regions, free print distribution of scientific and academic publications has been the norm and the printed version has historically suffered from irregular publication and limited circulation, being in general absent from international indexes, producing low visibility of Latin American and the Caribbean scientific research output. In this context, Open Access has been an opportunity to increase visibility and access, and State funds with international cooperation support have been the great enablers of Open Access.

In the region there has been steady progress of regional Open Access initiatives that offer at no cost for authors and end users, open Access to full text scholarly and scientific publications of Latin America and the Caribbean. Among others, the following stand out:

 

  • Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal portals: These platforms, sponsored mainly by public funds, make it possible for journals to have an online presence, international visibility, bibliometric indicators and improved quality of editorial processes, a requirement for being accepted in those journal portals.
  • As of September 2015, from a total of 10,529 Open Access journals registered in DOAJ, approximately 2000 journals are from Latin America and the Caribbean, of which around 1000 journals are from Brazil. At regional level SciELO (since 1997) and Redalyc (since 2002) have developed Open Access peer-review journal portals, totaling over 1000 peer-reviewed OA journals from the region in Open Access, free for authors and for users. These portals are developing bibliometric and scientometric indicators that will complement traditional international indicators used for the evaluation of researchers from Latin America and the Caribbean. Both portals can also be searched in the Latindex harvester. There are also several journal portals at national level (e.g.: in Brazil SEER), and at institutional level (e.g. University of Sao Paulo-USP in Brazil, the National Autonomous University of México-UNAM in México, and University of Chile, have each more than a 100 Open Access journals in their journal portals). These initiatives of regional, national and institutional journal portals, are all contributing to improve quality of editorial processes, visibility of scholarly journals edited in Latin America, and growth of adoption of free (for authors and for users) Open Access.
  • National and regional theses portals. In digital repositories from Latin America and the Caribbean registered in ROAR and OpenDOAR, the most frequent full-text content are collections of electronic theses and dissertations (Cyberthesis, NDLTD) as well as national theses consortia (For example, Brazil, Chile and Peru, with initial promotion by UNESCO).

  • Subject digital repositories. In the 80's, mainly promoted by United Nations agencies and other organizations (Eg. ECLAC/CLADES and IDRC-LAC), and developed with ISIS Open Source Software distributed by UNESCO and customized by BIREME, subject bibliographic networks were developed which in recent years are incorporating links to full-texts, gradually transforming them into thematic digital repositories. As examples may be mentioned, among others: health (LILACS, BVS), agriculture (AGRIS, SIDALC), education (REDUC), nuclear information (INIS), public management and policies (CLAD-SIARE), social sciences (CLACSO), work (LABORDOC), marine sciences (OceanDocs). Other Open Access initiatives have sub-regional partners, as is the case of the Digital Library of the Caribbean, MANIOC, Central America Link (Enlace Centroamericano) and the Andean Digital Library. More recent regional Open Access initiatives include Relpe (education portals) and FLACSO (Social Sciences). The region is also participating with contents in international subject repositories that accept authors and institutions self-archiving, Eg.: arXiv.org (Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics), E-LIS (Information Science), REPEC (Economics), BIOLINE (includes bioscience journals from Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Venezuela), Social Science Research Network SSRN, e-revist@s (Iberoamerican journals in all subjects), among others.

 

And more recently, institutional repositories, for each institution to manage, give visibility and access to its own output. In OpenDOAR are registered 290 digital repositories from Latin America and the Caribbean. Brazil tops the list with 87 repositories (accounts for 30% of OA repositories from the region), followed at a distance by Colombia (39), Argentina (37), Mexico (29), Peru (29), Ecuador (26), Chile (19) and Venezuela (16), among others.

More than a million records are included in repositories registered from the region, of which an unknown number are still bibliographic records, not full-texts. The most frequent full-text content is theses, but in numbers journal articles are the main volume in the above-mentioned total, mainly due to full-text journal articles in more than 1000 journals from the region included in SciELO and Redalyc. Only a few developments are underway for scientific data digital repositories. The great majority of repositories use the Open Source Software DSpace.

As is the case in Europe, Latin America has recently started initiatives to integrate institutional repositories from the region. With support from the Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Research and Education Networks, RedCLARA and the Inter-American Development Bank-IDB, the project "Regional Strategy and Interoperability and Management Framework for a Latin American Federated Network of Institutional Scientific Documentation Repositories" started in 2010. As a result of the project, La Referencia was officially launched in 2012. La Referencia is a network of national systems of digital repositories, with 9 countires as initial members: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. Standardization, regional and international interoperability, a regional harvester and training, are among the objectives of this initiative, which works together with COAR. RedCLARA also supports CoLaBoRa, a Latin American community of professionals working in Digital Libraries and Repositories.

Other agencies and programs beyond Latin America that are active in the region for Open Access initiatives include UNESCO, PKP, INASP (training support and LAMJOL), NECOBELAC (training), FRIDA (award, research), ALFA (guidelines for repository development), IAP (creation and cooperation among science academy repositories and advanced research networks in the Caribbean), among other examples of international cooperation in the region, in many cases with UNESCO sponsorship. EIFL, in collaboration with respective national libraries also supports the development of OA infrastructure in Chile and Colombia.

In Latin America there is an active community of Open Access advocates among librarians and scholarly communication specialists. Their opinions and experiences can be followed in lists, wikis and blogs related to open access in the region. As well as in regional Open Access events (ex. BIREDIAL, UNAM OA Coloquium, and the Open Access Week events). Several regional declarations supporting open access have been issued in the region, ex.: 2005 and 2009.

In ROARMAP, Latin America has e-mandates registered, ~ 5% of the 724 mandates registered in the world. Brazil has the largest number of institutional OA policies registered (16) followed at a distance by Peru (6), Argentina (4), Venezuela (4), Colombia (3), Mexico (3) and Bolivia (1).

As legislation and mandates move forward that require Open Access to publicly funded research , national and regional repositories will have significant content to build national and regional indicators of value when assessing scientific output from researchers and institutions. These new indicators will complement traditional indicators currently used, which poorly reflect scientific output from the region. In 2014, UNESCO in partnership with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), the Network of Scientific Journals of Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal (RedALyC), Africa Journals Online (AJOL), the Latin America Social Sciences School Brazil (FLACSO-Brazil), and the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) published the book "Open Access Indicators and Scholarly Communications in Latin America". This book presents a summary of Open Access in Latin America, including a description of the major regional initiatives that are collecting and systematizing data related to Open Access scholarship, and also makes use of available data to present an understanding of the (i) growth, (ii) reach, and (iii) impact of Open Access in developing LAC countries using a variety of OA indicators.

The first Latin American and the Caribbean Open Science Forum (CILAC) is scheduled to be held in Montevideo, Uruguay in September 2016. The event is formulated within the context of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). CILAC 2016 is pioneered by UNESCO Regional Office for Sciences for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNESCO Montevideo). The forum aims to:

 

  • Contribute to building a regional agenda for Latin America and the Caribbean that strengthens science, technology and innovation policies aligned with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development;
  • Showcase the latest advances in science technology and innovation in region; and
  • Promote a dialogue between sciences, politics, civil society, academia, multilateral organizations and the private sector.

 

An important Open Science initiative is The Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet) composed of twelve researcher-practitioner teams from the Global South interested in understanding the role of openness and collaboration in science as a transformative tool for development in the region. Participating countries from Latin America include Brazil, Colombia and Argentina. The project is funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Canada and the Department for International Development (DFID) in the UK.

In particular OCSDNet aims to:

 

  • Support open science projects that can contribute to development goals in the Global South;
  • Identify structural, technical and policy barriers for organizations in the region to participate in Open and Collaborative Science;
  • Contribute to the building of a new area of study- Open and Collaborative Science in Development), produce knowledge to inform policy and practice, and a community of researchers who identify themselves as working on Open and Collaborative Science.

 

With regard to Open Data movement, in the legal domain, Peru and Argentina have recently enacted laws that will change the way institutions and researchers manage their data. These legal norms set new requirements for individuals and organizations whose research is publicly funded, as they will have to share their data in institutional and national repositories open to the public. In both cases, this has led to the development of technical infrastructure to make data management and sharing possible: the National System of Repositories (SNRD) in Argentina and the National Digital Repository of Open Access Science, Technology and Innovation (ALICIA) in Peru. In Mexico, a decree issued in 2014 introduced reforms to the Science and Technology Law of 2002 in order to promote and democratize access to scientific information, mandating the creation of a National Repository in which research data could be incorporated. It is expected that these norms will enhance the advancement of RDM in each country, and to foresee the development of standards, policies and/or guidelines to support its implementation.

Where no specific laws exist, government agencies are making efforts to contribute to data sharing and reuse. In Chile, the National Council of Science and Technology, (CONICYT), has published on its Scientific Data website an Open Data Policy Proposal, which is currently open for consultation, and which, if approved, will require researchers whose work has been funded by the agency to publish their data in open repositories. Another example is FAPESP, the funding agency of the Sao Paulo State, in Brazil, which currently requires that researchers applying for funds from the e-Science Program to present Research Data Management Plans.

In the technical domain, data repositories are being created in and across Latin American institutions. A particularly good example is the initiative of the Brazilian Institute of Science and Technology (IBTC), which created Rede Cariniana, a network of digital preservation services available to five Brazilian universities (USP, UNICAMP, UFPB, UFSM and UEMA). These institutions have access to Dataverse, a network created by Harvard University, in which they will make available the research data generated by their researchers in all fields of knowledge.

In addition institutions are also creating discipline-specific repositories, one example is the Data Center of the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, which operates a platform that gathers economic data generated by the University’s own Centro de Estudios de Desarrollo Económico (CEDE) and also acquires datasets through agreements with third parties, many of them being made open for reuse.

Furthermore, the concept of 'virtual open science laboratories' is also increasingly gaining momentum in the region. Virtual Morphology Laboratory is the first South American Free Online Virtual Science Laboratory. In a joint effort between Argentina and the UK, this laboratory has been created for teaching morphological topics interactively pertaining to cell biology, histology and embryology to the Health Science students at the National University of Cordoba, Argentina.Using popular electronic multimedia and inter-continental partnership, it is expected to enhance all aspects of biomedical education as a unique teaching resource in South America. Another example is the Leishmaniasis Virtual Laboratory which is a joint effort between Brazil and the EU. It tries to advance the current knowledge about the Leishmaniasis disease through open, collaborative research.

These are just a few examples of the efforts that institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean are making to work on the development of policy and infrastructure needed to make Scientific research and data elements accessible and manageable. Although much more work and collaboration is still needed, individuals and organizations continue to create awareness of the benefits of scientific data sharing and reuse.

Although Latin America is one of the most advanced regions in the world as per percentage of scientific output in local and regional publications available in Open Access, and with clear indications in the region of the existence of a favorable climate for the development of Open Access institutional and national repositories, advances may face multiple problems and challenges. Open Access implies policies, funding, infrastructure and ICT availability (for authors and institutions to publish online, and for users to access contents online), methodologies, metadata, contents (including text but also multimedia, data and Open Educational Resources) and the need to identify peer-reviewed contents, interoperability, training and advocacy for cultural change among stakeholders of the region who know little about Open Access benefits and lack knowledge about their rights when publishing with "green" editors registered in SHERPA-RoMEO.

Open Access initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean show minimal presence in their collections of articles published by researchers from the region in international journals. Advances in mandates that require self-archiving in institutional repositories, anticipate that a growing number of these articles could also be available in Open Access repositories, but it requires institutional Open Access policies to mandate, more than recommend, self-archiving. It also requires governments to negotiate with commercial publishers.

Another challenge in the region is to develop and promote the use of regional Open Access indicators as a complement of traditional impact factor when evaluating researchers, and value quality of journals and articles, more than their belonging to the so-called “mainstream” or “peripheral” science (Guédon, 2008; Vessuri, Guédon,Cetto 2014).

The region also needs improved internet access, though a steady rise in internet penetration has been observed over the years. In 2015, Latin America and the Caribbean has in average an internet penetartion of 52.4%, but access is mainly concentrated in populated urban areas. Levels of connectivity in the Caribbean are relatively low (from 6% in many countries, to 60% in a few exceptions). Several programs are working towards solving the problems associated with the ‘digital divide’, among them are initiatives sponsored by RedCLARA, UNESCO, IAP,IDRC and for civil society access APC and FUNREDES. As connectivity increases, greater interactivity between open access initiatives will be possible.

There is confusion about copyright issues and Open Access, it needs clarification and support for decision-making and policies. Creative Commons CC, working together with partners in 11 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, promotes the use of Open Access licenses. CC mentions that 75% of Open Access academic publications in Latin America do not establish Open Access editorial policies that regulate the use of the Open Access content and provide a legal framework for use of the publications, leaving interpretations to the default legislation in each country.

Main concerns and challenges ahead for Open Access scholarly communications in the region were mentioned by representatives of 23 countries in the Final Report of UNESCO´s Regional Latin American and Caribbean Consultation on Open Access to Scientific Information and Research held in 2013.

An extensive bibliography of contributions from Open Access initiatives also contribute to a better understanding of where the region is today and challenges ahead.

Active participation in Open Access initiatives is needed from key institutions of the region in terms of scientific output, coupled with coordination from government research policy and funding agencies, with support from regional and international programs and cooperation, to advance Open Access institutional, national and regional strategies and actions that will benefit education, research and society at large in Latin America and the Caribbean.

 

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