Who pays? Who reads? Who Benefits? Open access journals in Latin America

• In Event: Open Science: How to Unlock Equitable Access to Research

Proposal

Since 1772 when Mercurio Volante the first scientific journal was published in Mexico (it stopped in 1773 after publishing 12 issues) the landscape of scholarly journals produced in Latin America and the Caribbean region (LA&C) has experienced an impressive transformation. There are more than 15000 ISSNs registered in Latin America, and the Latin American Journal Collection includes approximately 2500 scientific journals. The transformation of the scientific and scholarly publication in LAC has been an uneven process, with most of the production concentrated in a Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Chile; with many successful journals, pockets of excellence, innovative models, as well as numerous failed enterprises, entrenched obstacles, and challenges. Understood as a field, scientific publications in LAC are quite diverse in terms of quality and reach but one of the most distinguishing and unifying features of this field has been the extensive and intensive use of Open Access (OA) publishing models, particularly when compared to other regions in the world. Of the 239 OA journals indexed by ISI in 2003, 33 were from Latin America and the Caribe, compared to 58 for North America and 45 for Western Europe. Similarly, using the 15000 publications indexed by Scopus in 2010, the proportions of OA peer reviewed journals were 73,9 % for Latin America, 4,9 % for North America and 6,9 % for Europe. Such an extensive use of OA in scholarly communications, confirms its effectiveness for sharing knowledge, and in the particular case of Latin America it needs to be seen in relationship to several concurring influences: a strong traditional sense of the public mission among most research intensive universities —which are the main publishers of scholarly work; a weak presence of the commercial publishers of academic work; and the accelerated expansion of the research and scientific capacities in the region. This paper will analyze three key challenges that the OA scholarly journals in LAC are facing: a) finding economic models that will provide long term financial sustainability; b) assessing the scientific and scholarly impact of the articles published, and c) developing models of communication that will enhance the social relevance of the scientific production of the region.

Author

• Gustavo E. Fischman, Arizona State University