Introduction

Together with other countries of the region, Uruguay participates in open access regional subject repositories, today with a growing number of records with open access full-texts, examples: health (BVS), agriculture (SIDALC), science (PERIÓDICA), education (Relpe), public management and policies (CLAD-SIARE), social sciences (CLASE, CLACSO and FLACSO), work (LABORDOC), marine science (Oceandocs), information science (E-Lis), among others.

In 2004, at the Meeting on scientific publication and copyright in the digital world, the Scielo project was presented in Uruguay. A study (Open Access Indicators and Scholarly Communications in Latin America) shows that, as of 2014, 1.59% (86) OA journals indexed in Latindex and 0.29% (2) OA journals indexed in RedALyC are published in Uruguay.

As of March 2021, 8 OA repositories are registered in OpenDOAR and 30 OA journals are registered in DOAJ compared to that of 9  OA journals in 2016. No mandates are registered in ROARMAP. Further adoption of institutional repositories and mandates can be encouraged with participation of Uruguay in COLABORA, Red Federada Repositorios and other regional initiatives sponsored by RedCLARA, whose member in Uruguay is Red Académica Uruguaya / RAU2.

Enabling Environment

An enabling factor for future open access education initiatives is the fact that the government of Uruguay issued a plan CEIBAL to ensure that each child and teacher has a laptop connected to internet to improve education and information opportunities for them.

Uruguay, represented by BINAME/CEDIM (the National Library of Medicine) is now a member of Latindex, where this country has a few journals in full-text. Latindex Uruguay has also presence in Facebook to publish news on electronic publishing, scientific publishing, open access and course announcements.

In 2015, Uruguay became a new affiliate of the international community of Creative Commons (CC). The CC team of Uruguay signed their MoU and are now officially in. The CC team welcomed on its official blog new chapters from Uruguay. CC Uruguay Working Group began its training chapter in early 2013. The multidisciplinary team includes artists, teachers, librarians, sociologists, cultural managers, programmers and lawyers. Team members were heavily involved in the authors communities with cultural and educational institutions and also government (ministries and Parliament), which seek to promote the use of free licenses, copyright and socialization of the common cultural heritage and digitization of public domain. The team is supported by a large group of volunteers and by the Association of Librarians of Uruguay, which was established towards the end of 2014.

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; 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 Ministry of 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 National Agency for Research and Innovation (Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación- ANII) promotes open access to research publications, and has developed Portal TIMBÓ with open access contents in support of education and research, and presence in Facebook and Twitter.

Among other open access local initiatives, the Central Bank of Uruguay has developed a virtual library for economic resources (BV-RIE Biblioteca Virtual de Recursos para la Investigación Económica

Events and Programmes

Acceso Abierto en la Universidad de la República, October 28, 2016 from 9am to 11am – Uruguay.

On 22 May, 2015, the course "Free Culture and Creative Commons in Uruguay" was organized in a virtual classroom for participants, with the aim of upgrading knowledge on the issues of free culture and intellectual property. The discussions addressed topics such as the correct use of CC license, social awareness and OA Policy promotion. The first course was attended by over 40 people.

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).

Grattarola, F., G. Botto, I. da Rosa, N. Gobel, E. M. González, J. González, D. Hernández, G. Laufer, R. Maneyro, J. A. Martínez-Lanfranco, D. E. Naya, A. L. Rodales, L. Ziegler, and D. Pincheira-Donoso. 2019. “Biodiversidata: An Open-Access Biodiversity Database for Uruguay.” Biodiversity Data Journal 7. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.7.e36226.

Grattarola, F., J. A. Martínez-Lanfranco, G. Botto, D. E. Naya, R. Maneyro, P. Mai, D. Hernández, G. Laufer, L. Ziegler, E. M. González, I. da Rosa, N. Gobel, A. González, J. González, A. L. Rodales, and D. Pincheira-Donoso. 2020. “Multiple Forms of Hotspots of Tetrapod Biodiversity and the Challenges of Open-Access Data Scarcity.” Scientific Reports 10(1). doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-79074-8.