“Open access is often discussed as a process of flipping the existing closed subscription based model of scholarly communication to an open one. However, in Latin America an open access ecosystem for scholarly publishing has been in place for over a decade. In this post, Eduardo Aguado-López and Arianna Becerril-Garcia discuss open access developments in Latin America and the AmeliCA initiative to develop a cooperative infrastructure for scientific communication. They also reflect on how the recent proposals put forward by cOAlition S to foster open access publication in the Global North, could potentially negatively impact open access efforts in Latin America. …”
Category Archives: oa.amelica
AmeliCA, Redalyc, and Open Access in Latin America, Arianna Becerril-Garcia – YouTube
A 4.28 minute video by Arianna Becerril-Garcia. “This will be part of Module 6 of the Open Science MOOC, on Open Access to Research Papers.”
AmeliCA – SPARC
“Latin America has a vision for open scholarly communication—and it works. Scientists have long shared their research results through academic institutions, sidestepping the commercial publishing structure and enabling equitable access to all.
Now, as market forces threaten to alter the landscape, a new effort is underway to preserve the unique, publicly-funded approach and celebrate the successful model native to the region.
Open Knowledge for Latin American and the Global South, known as AmeliCA, launched in October 2018 with the goal of strengthening well-established scientific publishing and building partnerships. The coalition strives to develop a platform across institutions that will enable journals to keep operating without charging authors or readers. To date, 18 universities have joined and more than 100 journals are sharing a common infrastructure of software, tools, hosting, and training services.
Recognizing that equity and inclusion are at the center of this initiative’s mission, SPARC honors AmeliCA with its June 2019 Innovator Award as a shining example of what works with Open Access….”
Amelica: First Biannual Report
“AmeliCA has reached its first six months of experience seeking to consolidate a collaborative, sustainable, protected and non-commercial Open Access solution for Latin America and the Global South. AmeliCA’s goal —as well as the organizations’ that take part in it— is to build a sustained, academy-led and academy-owned communication system. AmeliCA is a mutual agreement, where Latin America and the Global South shape strategies. Its achievements are presented in this First biannual report….”
Open and Shut?: The OA interviews: Arianna Becerril-García, Chair of AmeliCA
“A professor in the School of Political and Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico (UAEM), Arianna Becerril-García is also the Executive Director of Redalyc, the Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America and the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal. Redalyc is a regional open access portal for the social sciences and humanities that indexes 1,305 local journals and hosts the full texts of more than 650,000 articles. …
In addition, Becerril-García is the Chair of a new project called AmeliCA (Open Knowledge for Latin America and the Global South). AmeliCA’s goal is to propagate the Redalyc model to the more than 15,000 journals in the region and elsewhere in the Global South.
As Chair of AmeliCA, Becerril-García has become a vocal critic of Plan S – the European OA initiative announced last year by a group of funders that call themselves cOAlition S. While AmeliCA shares cOAlition S’s goal of achieving universal open access, says Becerril-García, it fears that, as currently conceived, Plan S would disenfranchise researchers in the Global South and exclude them further from the international scholarly publishing system….”
AmeliCA celebra el surgimiento de Invest in Open Infrastructure – AmeliCA
From Google’s English: “AmeliCA celebrates the emergence of Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) and is pleased to be part of this initiative for the benefit of an open, scalable and durable scientific infrastructure that seeks to extend its benefits on a global scale.
AmeliCA, whose principles revolve around the construction of a digital scientific communication system that provides universal access to scientific knowledge and is governed by responsible scientific evaluation systems, has worked for the visibility of science generated in the Global South, offering technology and advice to editorial teams. IOI and AmeliCA share the objective of achieving an Open Access academic publication infrastructure at the service of society….”
São Paulo Statement on Open Access | National Research Foundation
“The representatives of African Open Science Platform, AmeLICA, cOAlition S, OA2020, and SciELO – five of the major worldwide Open Access initiatives – met on 01 May 2019 during the annual meeting of the Global Research Council (GRC) in Sao Paulo. They are united in their common mission of making knowledge available and accessible wherever it can have the greatest impact and help solve humanity’s challenges regardless of where it was produced.
The combined effect of the five initiatives has generated a new momentum in the push towards universal, full and immediate Open Access.
The Five Initiatives jointly state that:
- They consider that scholarly and scientific knowledge is a global public good. When generated by public funds, free access to it is a universal right.
- They share one common ultimate objective: providing universal, unrestricted, and immediate Open Access to scholarly information, including use and re-use by humans and machines.
- They share the belief that this common goal can be achieved through a variety of approaches.
- They will pursue points of alignment among their approaches and ways to co-operate towards reaching the shared objective.
- They seek an active dialogue with all stakeholders, including researchers, research funders, universities, libraries, publishers, learned societies, governments, and citizens to take into account the diversity of the global scholarly community….”
Principios y Valores – AmeliCA
[Undated] From Google’s English:
Principles and values
one.
Scientific knowledge generated with public funds is a common good and access to it is a universal right.
two.
Open Access must be protected legally to avoid the appropriation of scientific knowledge for profit.
3.
Open Access has no future or meaning without an evolution in the systems of evaluation to research.
Four.
The consolidation of Open Access must consider the transition to digital scientific communication as an essential axis.
5.
The economic investment in Open Access must be consistent with its benefit to society, just as commercial solutions are paid.
6
The adverse economic scenarios that the AA faces must be overcome with work schemes based on collaboration and sustainability, favoring that the scientific publication continues sustained and led by the academy.
7
It is necessary to recognize the diversity of scientific journals and stop the pressures that seek to homogenize them. For their part, journals should support the strengthening of institutional repositories through the disappearance of embargo and assignment of rights policies.
8
The social impact of science is the basis of the existence of Open Access.
9
It is necessary to respect the different dynamics of generation and circulation of knowledge by area, especially the dynamics of Social Sciences and Humanities.
10
Open Access must be permanently conceptualized and defined accordingly. The three “B” homogenize the conditions of the development of science and the conditions of the South are different from those of the North….”
Los costos del APC: el caso de la Universidad de Antioquia – AmeliCA
From Google’s English: “The costs of publishing openly according to the European tendency to regulate its market of scientific publications have generated a debate that warns Latin America about the need to take a position on the cost that policies such as the Plan S for the development of science and its circulation. Latin America has been a pioneer in proposing a path for open science, provided that the publications of the region were born in open access, where scientific production is created and circulated by the academy itself. However, an important part of European and North American publications have not only charged for publishing, and do so increasingly, but also charge for access to articles. That cost has not been calculated for Latin America. Here is a first exercise,
In the Institutional Development Plan 2017-2027 , the University of Antioquia adopted open science as one of the guidelines that will guide the development of the Institution in the decade. Under this framework, the University approved in April 2018 the Open Access Policy to the publications for the entity, in which it is defined that the institutional commitment is oriented towards the “Deposited Deposit”, in which the Library System assumes a leading role to be responsible for administering the Institutional Repository that houses the scientific production of the University, provided that copyright (moral and patrimonial) permit.
However, in the areas of socialization and disclosure of the policy it has been observed that a common concern of the researchers has revolved around who would be responsible for financing publications in open access. This in the sense of who finances the Article Processing Charges (APC), automatically assuming that the publication in open access implies the payment of APC to publishers, and ignoring that there are other routes under which open access works and that they require the APC [2] .
It is for this reason, among others, that the University of Antioquia has initiated the development of strategies to size and demystify open access in the Institution. In the first case, an investigative exercise was carried out to measure the institutional practices in Open Access, from the bibliographic sources and with the computation capacities that the CoLaV of the UdeA has been building, this being a collaborative that we have been developing in University. In the second case, an awareness campaign has been designed, open UdeA, which seeks to bring the actors of the University to the world of open access, showing its advantages, practices and the need for its implementation in the institution.
The present text seeks to show progress in the first case, giving a global panorama of the case of the University of Antioquia….”
São Paulo Statement on Open Access
“The representatives of African Open Science Platform, AmeLICA, cOAlition S, OA2020, and SciELO – five of the major worldwide Open Access initiatives – met on 1 May 2019 during the annual meeting of the Global Research Council in São Paulo, Brazil. They are united in their common mission of making knowledge available and accessible wherever it can have the greatest impact and help solve humanity’s challenges regardless of where it was produced. The combined effect of the five initiatives has generated a new momentum in the push towards universal, full, and immediate Open Access….”
São Paulo Statement on Open Access | Plan S
The representatives of African Open Science Platform, AmeLICA, cOAlition S, OA2020, and SciELO – five of the major worldwide Open Access initiatives – met on 1 May 2019 during the annual meeting of the Global Research Council in São Paulo, Brazil. They are united in their common mission of making knowledge available and accessible wherever it can have the greatest impact and help solve humanity’s challenges regardless of where it was produced.
The combined effect of the five initiatives has generated a new momentum in the push towards universal, full, and immediate Open Access.
The Five Initiatives Jointly State That:
- They consider that scholarly and scientific knowledge is a global public good. When generated by public funds, free access to it is a universal right.
- They share one common ultimate objective: providing universal, unrestricted, and immediate Open Access to scholarly information, including use and re-use by humans and machines.
- They share the belief that this common goal can be achieved through a variety of approaches.
- They will pursue points of alignment among their approaches and ways to co-operate towards reaching the shared objective.
- They seek an active dialogue with all stakeholders, including researchers, research funders, universities, libraries, publishers, learned societies, governments, and citizens to take into account the diversity of the global scholarly community.
Global support for Plan S gathers pace
“The Plan S open-access initiative, which has divided researchers in Europe, is inching closer to the global backing it needs to bring about a revolution in academic publishing.
Plan S gained potentially transformative support on 12 February when K Vijay Raghavan, the Indian government’s principal scientific adviser, announced that his country would join the coalition of funders backing the initiative. “India joining Coalition S: journal subscriptions, publishing charges block access to publicly funded knowledge,” he said on Twitter. He added that India would “optimise” the initiative to its benefit, but did not elaborate on how or specify which of the country’s funders would participate….
Smits told Research Europe that Jordan and Zambia’s National Science and Technology Council had also signed up this year. Other signatories include the philanthropic funder the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and 15 European funders.
Along with many research organisations in Europe, three national organisations in China have expressed their support without signing up….
In January, Plan S was criticised by Arianna Becerril-Garcia, the president of a similar initiative called Open Knowledge for Latin America and the Global South (Amelica), which was launched in December 2018. She described Plan S as Eurocentric, regulatory and a source of concern for the global south.
But Smits and Becerril-Garcia have now agreed that the two initiatives should try to work together. Becerril-Garcia said that a good starting point would be to discuss the feedback Amelica submitted to Plan S, “where we highlight the importance to propose actions for scholarly-led and community-driven open access”. She said she would invite Smits to meet in Mexico….”
AmeliCA vs Plan S: Same target, two different strategies to achieve Open Access. – AmeliCA
On 4 September 2018, a group of national research funding organizations, with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC), announced the launch of COAlition S, an initiative to make full and immediate Open Access (OA) to research publications a reality. It is built around Plan S, which consists of one target and 10 principles (Science Europe, 2019). The target is:
“By 2020 scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants provided by participating national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms. “
At the same time but in another region of the world AmeliCA was brewing, the extension of REDALYC’s philosophy, knowledge and technology to the Global South (Becerril-Garcia & Aguado-Lopez, 2018). AmeliCA is a multi-institutional community-driven initiative supported by UNESCO that arises in response to the international, regional, national and institutional contexts of Open Access, which seeks a collaborative, sustainable, protected and non-commercial solution for Open Knowledge in Latin America and the Global South (AmeliCA, 2018). This institution of Commons was launched at the Conference of CLACSO on November 21, 2018, in the “UNESCO Special Forum: Democratization of academic knowledge. The challenges for open access to knowledge. “
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AmeliCA vs Plan S: Same target, two different strategies to achieve Open Access – YouTube
A video comparing Plan S and AmeliCA.