Category Archives: oa.México

Global Summit on Diamond Open Access, 23-27 October 2023, Toluca, Mexico | AmeliCA

Posted on by
Reply

The purpose of the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access is to bring together the Diamond OA community of journal editors, organizations, experts, and stakeholders from the Global South and North, in a dialogue that seeks to implement collective action in the spirit of the Recommendations on Open Science from UNESCO and BOAI 20 years, where Equity, Sustainability, Quality and Usability are the pillars of our journey.

 

This summit expresses a commitment to keep a frank and open conversation to establish common ground. Such a dialogue will allow us to strengthen a more inclusive publishing sector that fosters scientific advances. Joining forces, sharing infrastructure, increasing capacities, meeting, and recognizing each other, and understanding that OA is a means to an end, are the motivations that guide the call for a Global Summit on Diamond Open Access.

 

For the first time the global OA Diamond community will meet in Toluca, Mexico to exchange and coordinate actions to better support equity in scholarly communication practices. The summit, co-organised by Redalyc, the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, AmeliCA, UNESCO, CLACSO and the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, will combine two conferences during Open Access Week. The first conference of this double header is the IV Redalyc Journal Editors International Conference, which will celebrate the 20th anniversary of Redalyc and which will include the II Meeting of AmeliCA members. The second conference will welcome the 2nd session of the Diamond Open Access Conference that brings together signatories of the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access. 

We invite all actors from all continents who share the vision of scholarly communication for the common good to come together, in a multilingual and diverse event, to start a movement that will lead us to recognize and support Diamond Open Access publishing to direct actions to achieve a global village of knowledge.

 

PLOSAnnounces Publishing Agreement With the Largest Research Institution in Mexico

Posted on by
Reply

(UNAM) and the Public Library of Science (PLOS) today announced a one-year agreement, brokered by Accucoms (PLOS’ regional representative),that will allow UNAM researchers to publish in PLOS ONE and other select PLOS journals[1] without incurring article processing charges (APC). Flat fee agreements and PLOS’ other models shift publishing costs from authors to research institutions based on prior publishing history and anticipated future growth with PLOS. The agreement with UNAM starts on January 1, 2023.

 

IOP Publishing expands open access offer to Latin America through unlimited transformative agreement  – IOP Publishing

Posted on by
Reply

“IOP Publishing (IOPP) has reached an unlimited transformative agreement with the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) allowing affiliated researchers to publish their work open access (OA) at no cost to them. The fees for publishing their work openly will be covered centrally by UNAM, a public research university ranked as one of the best and biggest universities in Latin America….”

Associated institutions in Mexico and the US launch the Repository of Documentation on Disappearances in Mexico | CRL

Posted on by
Reply

“On March 23-24 the “Truth, Justice, Memory: Documentary Evidence in the Digital Age” conference will take place at El Colegio de México, where the digital platform Repository of Documentation on Disappearances in Mexico (RDDM)

(link is external) will launch.

RDDM is a collaborative initiative between four partner institutions – the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), the Colegio de México (El COLMEX), the Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas (IIJ-UNAM) and the Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México (UIA-CDMX). RDDM seeks to gather and safeguard human rights documentation on disappearances in Mexico since the beginning of the War on Drugs in 2006. …”

Alberto López Cuenca & Renato Bermúdez Dini (2022) Otros términos para debatir la propiedad intelectual (Beyond the Author’s Rights: Debating Intellectual Property in Other Terms) | Open Humanities Press

Posted on by
Reply

On July 1, 2020, reforms to the Federal Copyright Act (LFDA, for its acronym in Spanish) entered into force in Mexico responding to the primarily economic requirements of the renewed free trade agreement with the United States and Canada, the USMCA. Facing these reforms, a group of Mexican and international associations and individuals raised their voices due to the numerous implications that they entailed for free speech, due judicial process, access to culture and education, technological sovereignty and their environmental impact, among others. In order to trace the deep reaching that the LFDA has today to the detriment of other rights and already established practices, from the Centro Cultural de España in Mexico City we proposed to inscribe these concerns and debate them on a broader sociocultural plane, starting from four conceptual nodes: 1) native knowledges; 2) open knowledge; 3) digital selfediting and rewriting; 4) hacktivisms. This book brings together contributions from Alberto López Cuenca, Anamhoo, David Cuartielles, Diana Macho Morales, Domingo M. Lechón, Eduardo Aguado-López, Gabriela Méndez Cota, Irene Soria, Leandro Rodríguez Medina, Marla Gutiérrez Gutiérrez, Mónica Nepote, Nika Zhenya, Renato Bermúdez Dini and Víctor Leonel Juan-Martínez.

El 1 de julio de 2020 entró en vigor una reforma a la Ley Federal del Derecho de Autor (LFDA) en México que respondía a las exigencias prioritariamente económicas del renovado tratado de libre comercio con Estados Unidos y Canadá, el T-MEC. Frente a estas reformas, un conjunto de colectivos, asociaciones e individuos mexicanos e internacionales levantaron la voz por las numerosas implicaciones que suponían para la libertad de expresión, el debido proceso judicial, el acceso a la cultura y a la educación, la soberanía tecnológica y el impacto medioambiental, entre otras. Para rastrear el profundo alcance que en nuestros días tiene la LFDA en detrimento de otros derechos y prácticas ya afianzadas, desde el Centro Cultural de España en Ciudad de México nos propusimos inscribir estas preocupaciones y debatirlas en un plano sociocultural más amplio, a partir de cuatro nodos conceptuales: 1) saberes originarios; 2) conocimiento abierto; 3) autoedición y reescrituras digitales; 4) hacktivismos. Este libro reúne contribuciones de Alberto López Cuenca, Anamhoo, David Cuartielles, Diana Macho Morales, Domingo M. Lechón, Eduardo Aguado-López, Gabriela Méndez Cota, Irene Soria, Leandro Rodríguez Medina, Marla Gutiérrez Gutiérrez, Mónica Nepote, Nika Zhenya, Renato Bermúdez Dini y Víctor Leonel Juan-Martínez.

 

Salvador Alcántar Morán: Mexican Copyright Unfit-for-purpose in the Digital age, the Public Domain, and the Need for a True Multistakeholder Approach and a Global Perspective on Copyright

Posted on by
Reply

“Salvador Alcántar Morán is a lawyer, focused on digital copyright, educational technology and digital communications. He is the co-founder of Wikimedia Mexico and of Creative Commons Mexico. He was also manager of the General Direction of Digital Communications of the Mexico City Government. He talks about how the Mexican copyright framework is not adapted to the digital age and shaped mainly by the creative industries, the copyright industry’s scaremongering tactics. He also explains how the fact that Mexico has the lengthiest copyright term (100 years after the author’s death) negatively impacts the country’s collective memory and the public domain. In his view, the public domain should be considered as a human right. He further emphasises the need for normal citizens and other stakeholders, that are currently neglected, to be more involved in shaping a copyright framework that works for the digital age based on a true multistakeholder approach. He also talks about the need for a more global perspective on copyright in general….”

Open Resources: Pillars of Digital Education — Observatory | Institute for the Future of Education

Posted on by
Reply

“Open Educational Resources (OER) are the pillar of the universal right to education and pursuit of peace, proclaims UNESCO. The Education Division of this non-governmental organization (NGO) focuses on monitoring and analyzing global progress in adopting the open-access philosophy and resources and developing and disseminating policies.

Besides having an open access policy for its publications, UNESCO also published a guidelines manual to understand the concept of open resources and how to produce and potentiate them. The syllabus includes fundamental issues such as the types of OER, the role of licenses in the production, publication, and distribution of free materials, the adaptation of content for specific groups, and adult literacy and awareness of online content.

Tecnológico de Monterrey (Tec) also recognizes the value and need for open-access teaching materials and has a long history of producing and supporting the distribution of open resources. Currently, academic specialists in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) and the institution’s educational leaders are collaborating with Siemens Stiftung to maximize the reach and content of both networks of knowledge. Other areas of Tec, such as the Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education, are boosters of the philosophy of free didactic tools. How does the organization contribute in this respect?…”

UABC offers an online portal for open science

Posted on by
Reply

“In order to make public access to the scientific information, data, and products created at UABC [Autonomous University of Baja California] for the university community and society at large, the Open Science Project was initiated, a virtual space in which Maroon’s work and knowledge focus on scholars.

In this sense, Dr. Juan Guillermo Vaca Rodríguez, Head of the General Coordination of Research and Graduate Studies at UABC, explained that Open Science is a global movement that aims to open research (its methodologies, data, partial and final results and laboratory notes, among other products), from any discipline or field of knowledge.

In this way, the research created in this house of studies can be reused, redistributed, and reproduced by researchers, scientists, students, and anyone who wants to know how the world works and what happens outside of it.

To contribute to this movement, UABC has created the Open Science online portal which contains a search engine where required information can be found by author, title, subject, classification number, ISBN/ISSN, or nomenclature….

One relevant aspect of the portal is the Quality Seal, which will be awarded to internal bodies at UABC that comply with international best practices and standards for open science….”

An indexing system for the relevance of academic production and research from digital repositories and metadata | Emerald Insight

Posted on by

Abstract:  Purpose

This paper aims to propose a set of quantitative statistical indicators for measuring the scientific relevance of research groups and researchers, based on high-impact open-access digital production repositories.

Design/methodology/approach

An action research (AR) methodology is proposed in which research is associated with the practice; research informs practice and practice is responsible for informing research in a cooperative way. AR is divided into five phases, beginning with the definition of the problematic scenario and an analysis of the state of the art and ending with conducting tests and publishing the results.

Findings

The proposed indicators were used to characterise group and individual output in a major public university in south-eastern Mexico. University campuses hosting a large number of high-impact research groups. These indicators were very useful in generating information that confirmed specific assumptions about the scientific production of the university.

Research limitations/implications

The data used here were retrieved from Scopus and open access national repository of Mexico. It would be possible to use other data sources to calculate these indicators.

Practical implications

The system used to implement the proposed indicators is independent of any particular technological tool and is based on standards for metadata description and exchange, thus facilitating the easy integration of new elements for evaluation.

Social implications

Many organisations evaluate researchers according to specific criteria, one of which is the prestige of journals. Although the guidelines differ between evaluation bodies, relevance is measured based on elements that can be adapted and where some have greater weight than others, including the prestige of the journal, the degree of collaboration with other researchers and individual production, etc. The proposed indicators can be used by various entities to evaluate researchers and research groups. Each country has its own organisations that are responsible for evaluation, using various criteria based on the impact of the publications.

Originality/value

The proposed indicators assess based on the importance of the types of publications and the degree of collaborations. However, they can be adapted to other similar scenarios.

Building capacity through open approaches: Lessons from developing undergraduate electrophysiology practicals

Posted on by

Abstract:  Electrophysiology has a wide range of biomedical research and clinical applications. As such, education in the theoretical basis and hands-on practice of electrophysiological techniques is essential for biomedical students, including at the undergraduate level. However, offering hands-on learning experiences is particularly difficult in environments with limited resources and infrastructure. In 2017, we began a project to design and incorporate electrophysiology laboratory practicals into our Biomedical Physics undergraduate curriculum at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. We describe some of the challenges we faced, how we maximized resources to overcome some of these challenges, and in particular, how we used open scholarship approaches to build both educational and research capacity. The use of open tools, open platforms, and open licenses was key to the success and broader impact of our project. We share examples of our practicals and explain how we use these activities to strengthen interdisciplinary learning, namely the application of concepts in physics to understanding functions of the human body. Our goal is to provide ideas, materials, and strategies for educators working in similar resource-limited environments.

 

A Legal Deep Dive on Mexico’s Disastrous New Copyright Law

Posted on by

“Mexico has just adopted a terrible new copyright law, thanks to pressure from the United States (and specifically from the copyright maximalists that hold outsized influence on US foreign policy).

This law closely resembles the Digital Millennium Copyright Act enacted in the US 1998, with a few differences that make it much, much worse….”

 

CRL and East View Release Third Open Access Collection | CRL

Posted on by

“CRL and East View Information Services have released the Independent and Revolutionary Mexican Newspapers

(link is external), the third Open Access collection of titles digitized under the Global Press Archive (GPA) CRL Charter Alliance. This collection adds to the growing collection of Open Access material(link is external) available through East View’s Global Press Archive program.

The Independent and Revolutionary Mexican Newspapers collection, with a preliminary release of 135,000 pages from 477 titles, will ultimately include approximately 1,000 titles from Mexico’s pre-independence, independence and revolutionary periods (1807-1929). The collection traces the evolution of Mexico during this pivotal period and provides rare documentation of the dramatic events of this era, including coverage of Mexican partisan politics, yellow press, political and social satire, as well as local, regional, national and international news….”

Building Bridges for Social Justice in Global Publishing: Seeking the Mexican Perspective: The Serials Librarian: Vol 78, No 1-4

Posted on by

Abstract:  At the NASIG 2019 Conference, the presenter outlined how the dominance of English-language publishers based in the Global North negatively impacts researchers in Puebla, Mexico. Universities in the Global South must compete in world-wide university ranking systems, which intensifies the pressure to compete with researchers in the Global North to publish in journals of the Global North in order to demonstrate global competitiveness and local career standing. To support those competitive publishing expectations, institutions of the Global South must also subscribe to English-language journal packages of the Global North, thus locking in a cycle of academic publishing dominance. Meanwhile, Latin America is developing quality Open Access (OA) alternatives. In May 2018, the presenter received funding from a NASIG grant to interview journal editors and librarians at universities in Puebla, Mexico. Through these interviews, the presenter sought to explore challenges for researchers publishing in Global North journals, discuss the role of OA at the interviewees’ institutions, consider the future outlook for OA in Mexico, and examine the social justice implications of the academic journal publishing ecosystem. The presenter reported on findings from the interviews and invited members to discuss how engagement with researchers from the Global South can help the global scholarly communication ecosystem become more equitable.

 

Building Bridges for Social Justice in Global Publishing: Seeking the Mexican Perspective: The Serials Librarian: Vol 0, No 0

Posted on by

Abstract:  At the NASIG 2019 Conference, the presenter outlined how the dominance of English-language publishers based in the Global North negatively impacts researchers in Puebla, Mexico. Universities in the Global South must compete in world-wide university ranking systems, which intensifies the pressure to compete with researchers in the Global North to publish in journals of the Global North in order to demonstrate global competitiveness and local career standing. To support those competitive publishing expectations, institutions of the Global South must also subscribe to English-language journal packages of the Global North, thus locking in a cycle of academic publishing dominance. Meanwhile, Latin America is developing quality Open Access (OA) alternatives. In May 2018, the presenter received funding from a NASIG grant to interview journal editors and librarians at universities in Puebla, Mexico. Through these interviews, the presenter sought to explore challenges for researchers publishing in Global North journals, discuss the role of OA at the interviewees’ institutions, consider the future outlook for OA in Mexico, and examine the social justice implications of the academic journal publishing ecosystem. The presenter reported on findings from the interviews and invited members to discuss how engagement with researchers from the Global South can help the global scholarly communication ecosystem become more equitable.