“AIP Publishing is delighted to announce it has signed a three-year Read & Publish agreement with Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP), advancing its support of Open Access across the physical sciences….”
“In the 1990s, new repositories and databases were born that would become pillars of a solid infrastructure for open-access scientific communication. With the launch of the open access journals databases Latindex, SciELO and Redalyc, the digitisation of scientific journals was given a boost and a quality seal was granted to published research. With a strong public imprint, these repositories acted as a springboard for the development of non-commercial open access environment that is today the hallmark of the region.
Latin America now has the optimal conditions to create open science infrastructure that capitalises on these previous efforts. And two examples stand out.
Brazil’s BrCris was developed by the Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia alongside major national public agencies. Brazil is an immense country, with a professionalised scientific and technological system that has produced many databases on a national scale, making integration a huge challenge. Examples include the Open Data Portal, the CV system Plataforma Lattes and the directory of research groups known as CNPQ….
The second case is that of the PerúCRIS platform. It was first devised when Peru approved its Open Access Law in 2013. The need then arose to integrate three scientific information platforms: the directory of researchers, the national directory of institutions and the national network of repositories. The new platform also includes all undergraduate and graduate theses….”
“Fostering Diversity in Scholarly Communication: expanding and strengthening the role of repositories
Diversity is an important characteristic of any healthy ecosystem, including scholarly communications. Diversity in services, platforms, funding mechanisms, and evaluation measures will allow the system to accommodate the needs of different research communities and support a variety of workflows, languages, scholarly outputs, and research topics.
As we continue on the path towards full and immediate open access (and open scholarship more broadly) we must think about how we can create the conditions that allow diversity to exist and flourish. At COAR we recognize and celebrate the diversity of our community. At the same time, we understand that diversity cannot thrive unless it is fostered in an intentional way, through strong coordination.
This meeting will be an opportunity to discuss how we can use the global repository network to support greater diversity, while also supporting the need for an international system. We will learn more about the current context in Latin America, and raise awareness of other approaches being developed around the world….”
“LA Referencia gives visibility to the scientific production of higher education and research institutions in Latin America, promotes open and free access to the full text, with special emphasis on publicly financed results….We are a network of repositories of open access to science in Latin America.”
“Thousands of scientists in Germany, Peru and Taiwan are preparing for a new year without online access to journals from the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier. Contract negotiations in both Germany and Taiwan broke down in December, while Peru’s government has cut off funding for a licence….Elsevier and the [German] DEAL consortium, says Hippler, are still far apart with regards to pricing and the OA business model. “Taxpayers have a right to read what they are paying for,” he says. “Publishers must understand that the route to open-access publishing at an affordable price is irreversible.”
In Taiwan, meanwhile, more than 75% of universities, including the country’s top 11 institutions, have joined a collective boycott against Elsevier, says Yan-Jyi Huang, library director at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST, also known as Taiwan Tech).
On 7 December, the Taiwanese consortium, CONCERT, which represents more than 140 institutions, announced it would not renew its contract with Elsevier because fees were too high. Elsevier switched to dealing with universities individually. But the NTUST and many others — including Taiwan’s leading research institute, Academia Sinica — have each decided to uphold the boycott, from 1 January 2017….”
From Google Translate’s English translation of an announcement from Peru’s CONCYTEC: “We inform the scientific and academic communication that on December 31 of this year [2016] the subscription to the databases ScienceDirect and Scopus ends.”