MADE IN LATIN AMERICA: OPEN ACCESS, SCHOLARLY JOURNALS, AND REGIONAL INNOVATIONS

[From the Foreward] "LATIN AMERICA IS THE MOST ADVANCED REGION in the world when it comes to adopting open access to their scientific and scholarly journals, which, for the most part, are available full text on the Web at no cost to either the reader or the author, significantly increasing the visibility and accessibility to scientific production in the region. This movement of open access to journals in the region was driven primarily by regional initiatives: SciELO; RedALyC; Latindex, the Portal of Portals (PPL); and, recently, journal collections in institutional open access digital repositories. These institutional repositories collaborate in national repository systems for science and technology that cooperate regionally under the Federated Network of Institutional Repositories of Scientific Publications ‘La Referencia’ (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas), a movement endorsed by advances at domestic legislation level in favor of open access to scientific information through digital repositories. Latin America distinguishes itself from other regions of the world by considering the scientific information as a common good. All the above initiatives are publicly funded and managed by the same academic community that publishes scientific journals, unlike in Europe and the United States, where much of the scientific communication — mainly journals — has been outsourced and commercialized. MADE IN LATIN AMERICA 12 The book presented here provides the results of exploratory research and different perspectives on achievements, detected problems and challenges the region will be facing in the future, in relation to access, visibility, and scientific and social impact of research published in journals in Latin America, the evaluation of these journals by assessment systems and incentives for academic and scientific careers in the region. The coordinators of this initiative, Juan Pablo Alperin (PKP) and Gustavo Fischman (FLACSO), provide recommendations to address the paradoxes detected by the authors of the studies and essays, which are the result of the project Quality in Open Access Scholarly Communication in Latin America, coordinated by FLACSO-Brazil and a team of researchers from Latindex, Public Knowledge Project (PKP), RedALyC, and SciELO-Brazil, funded by the International Development and Research Center (IDRC)-Canada ..."