Lessons from Redalyc’s Organic Rise as a Model of Diamond Open Access - SPARC

"The first version of Redalyc was drawn on a napkin in 2002 by Eduardo Aguado López. A sociology professor at the time, he was talking about how to create a website to upload a journal with Arianna Becerril García,  a computer engineering student.

“It was not really planned like a start up with investment and stakeholders,” said Becerril García, executive director of the nonprofit that now supports a network of scholarly journals from around the world. “We didn’t have a recipe or an algorithm to do it. We were just building a path, always trying to innovate, and listen to journal editors.”

Responding to the needs of journals and working collaboratively with evolving technology has been key to the success of the Redalyc (Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y El Caribe, España y Portugal) project, as it was called at the beginning. Owned by the academy and based at the public Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, Redalyc is a scientific information network that serves as an index of open access journals. It includes 1,572 journals and nearly 800,000 full-text articles from 755 institutions in 31 countries.

The non-commercial infrastructure embraces science as a public good that should be free – and freely shared. Rather than relying on Article Processing Charges (APCs), Redalyc open access journals are published under the Diamond Open Access model, supported in ways that are aimed at promoting equity in scholarly communication. The organization is committed to keeping control of publishing within the academic community to ensure a sustainable scientific ecosystem that includes the voices of all who want to participate.

Redalyc was a forerunner of the diamond open access movement and is widely respected for what it has accomplished, said Reggie Raju, director of research and learning services at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. It has managed to overcome financial and regional challenges...."