Introduction

Ecuador has approved in 2010 a higher education law that requires the deposit of graduate and postgraduate theses in the Higher Education National Information System. It is a country that has been very active in recent years in the development of institutional repositories: 37 digital repositories are registered in OpenDOAR as of March 2021, mainly higher education institutional repositories with a concentration on theses contents. And a few universities from Ecuador have a thesis in Cybertesis. No mandates are currently registered as of 2021 in ROARMAP.

A recent study (Open Access Indicators and Scholarly Communications in Latin America) shows that, as of 2014, 2.31% of OA journals indexed in Latindex and 0.14% of OA journals indexed in RedALyC are published in Ecuador. This corresponds to a total of 125 and 1 locally published OA journals for the two journal databases, respectively.

Enabling Environment

SENESCYT is the national focal point of LATINDEX, which provides links to 6 open access journals from Ecuador. This country has 80 open access journals registered in DOAJ as of March 2021 increasing significantly from 11 in 2016. Together with other countries of the region, Ecuador participates in open access regional subject repositories with a growing number of full-texts, examples: health (BVS), agriculture (SIDALC), science (PERIÓDICA), education (Relpe), public management and policies (CLAD-SIARE), social sciences (CLACSO, FLACSO, CLASE), work (LABORDOC), marine sciences (Oceandocs), among others.

Four university libraries from Ecuador participate with full-texts in the Bibliotheca Digital Andiana.

Creative Commons promotes the use of open licenses in Ecuador.

5-8 March 2013: 30 experts and Policy specialists from 25 countries including Belize; Virgin Islands; St Vincent and Grenadines; St Kitts and Nevis and St Martin; Argentina; Brazil; Chile; Costa Rica; Dominican Republic; El Salvador; Guatemala; Ecuador; Uruguay and Mexico gathered in Kingston to develop strategies and a road map to implement open access policies in the Latin American and Caribbean Region. This was the first regional consultation on open access to scientific information and research organized by the UNESCO Kingston Cluster office in collaboration with the Ministry of Science, Technology, Energy and Mining, Ministry of Information, Government of Jamaica, University of West Indies and UNESCO National Commission for Jamaica. Workshop participants had the opportunity to contribute towards highlighting priority areas for intervention to achieve “Openness” in the region and individual countries. Participants reviewed the UNESCO OA policy templates and worked out specific policies for their own country/institution.

Key Organizations

The Consortium of University Libraries from Ecuador (Consorcio de Bibliotecas Universitarias del Ecuador-COBUEC) is a harvester for contents from repositories of universities and other higher education institutions. And FLACSO Andes has developed a harvester oriented to social sciences (Buscador Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales) and Flacso Andes with digital contents.

The Ecuadorian Consortium for Advanced Internet Development (Consorcio Ecuatoriano para el Desarrollo de Internet Avanzado / Red Nacional de Investigación y Educación del Ecuador-CEDIA) coordinates the National Network of Repositories (Red de Repositorios), which is the national focal point of RedCLARA (Latin America Cooperation of Advanced Networks) and, together with the National Secretary of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (Secretaría Nacional de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación-SENESCYT), are the focal points of the Latin America Network of Institutional Repositories National Systems (Red Federada Latinoamericana de Repositorios Institucionales de Documentación Científica). Ecuador has also members in CoLaBoRa, the Latin America Community of Digital Libraries and Repositories.

Events and Programmes

• Jornadas Descubriendo la Ciencia Abierta 2020-10-27, Ecuador, Organized by Francisco Silva | Type: jornadas
• On 4 December, 2014, CEDIA (the National Research and Education Network of Ecuador) announced the launch of the Network of Open Access Repositories of Ecuador- RRAAE http://road.issn.org/en. The network will increase the visibility of the scientific research output distributed in different national institutional repositories. In 2014, the network was reported to hold 46,630 valid records of undergraduate theses, dissertations, articles etc. They have been working since 2013 with institutional repositories to promote open access academic-scientific production in Ecuador.
• Jornadas Descubriendo la Ciencia Abierta 2020-10-27,    Ecuador, Organized by Francisco Silva | Type: jornadas

Publications

• 2014: "Open Access Indicators and Scholarly Communications in Latin America" is the result of a joint research and development project supported by UNESCO and undertaken by 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).
• 21 May, 2015: "Has the open data movement reached Ecuador yet?" published on Data Blog on www.schoolofdata.org.
• Araujo, P. G., A. Gras, and M. Ginovart. 2016. “MbT-Tool: An Open-Access Tool Based on Thermodynamic Electron Equivalents Model to Obtain Microbial-Metabolic Reactions to Be Used in Biotechnological Process.” Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal 14:325–32. doi: 10.1016/j.csbj.2016.08.001.
• Belli, S., R. Cardenas, M. Velez, A. Rivera, and V. Santoro. 2019. “Open Science and Open Access, a Scientific Practice for Sharing Knowledge.” Pp. 156–67 in CEUR Workshop Proceedings. Vol. 2486.
• Bodero, E. M., M. De Giusti, C. D. Radicelli, and E. P. Villacrés. 2019. “Analyses of Institutional Open Access Digital Repositories in Ecuador [Análisis de Los Repositorios Digitales Institucionales de Acceso Abierto En El Ecuador].” Espacios 40(32).
• Fonseca, M. F. E., and M. Hallo. 2019. “Integration of Tools for Handling Open Access Scientific Articles [Integración de Herramientas Para El Manejo de Artículos Científicos de Acceso Abierto].” Pp. 32–39 in Proceedings - 2019 International Conference on Information Systems and Software Technologies, ICI2ST 2019.
• Hallo, M., F. Hallo, and S. Lujan-Mora. 2017. “Web Accessibility Problems on Latin American Open Access Scientific Journals [Problemas de Accesibilidad Web En Revistas Científicas de Acceso Abierto de América Latina].” in Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies, CISTI.
• Hallo, M., M. Escobar, and S. Lujan-Mora. 2018. “Automatic Extraction and Management of Open Access Bibliographic Information.” in EDUNINE 2018 - 2nd IEEE World Engineering Education Conference: The Role of Professional Associations in Contemporaneous Engineer Careers, Proceedings.
• Hallo, M., S. Lujan-Mora, and A. Mate. 2015. “Publishing a Scorecard for Evaluating the Use of Open-Access Journals Using Linked Data Technologies.” in IEEE CITS 2015 - 2015 International Conference on Computer, Information and Telecommunication Systems.
• Hallo, M., S. Luján-Mora, and A. Maté. 2017. “Evaluating Open Access Journals Using Semantic Web Technologies and Scorecards.” Journal of Information Science 43(1):3–16. doi: 10.1177/0165551515624353.
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