Open Access to Mexican Research – A Matter of International Social Justice

• In Event: Ciencia y universidad

Abstract

Latin America is at the forefront of the world-wide effort to provide open access to academic journal publishing currently dominated by expensive, English-language, commercial journal publishers based in the Global North. Their move to open access is in part a rebellion against the expectation of Latin American scholars to compete with researchers of the Global North to publish in those “prestigious” journals for career standing. Their institutions are also pressured to spend enormous subscription fees for those journals in order to meet criteria for global ranking and to compete in the knowledge economy. As a consequence, researchers of Latin America who do not publish in those journals can be professionally excluded from the global discourse while scholars in other parts of the world are deprived of scholarship outside a journal publishing system controlled by institutions in the Global North.

The presenter will share research interviews conducted in May 2018 with journal editors and librarians at universities in Puebla Mexico: La Universidad de las Américas Puebla (UDLAP), Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), and Universidad Iberoamericana, Puebla. Interviews explored challenges for researchers to publish in English-language, commercial journals of the Global North, how their institutions are compelled to subscribe to those expensive journals that many cannot afford, the current levels of open access involvement at their institutions, future outlook for open access in Mexico, and the social justice implications of the current global academic journal publishing ecosystem dominated by the English-speaking Global North on Mexico, Latin America, and the Global South.

Author

• Allan Scherlen, Appalachian State University