Latin America at the forefront of open access | Open to the public

[Form Google's English] "August 1999. With my Latin American colleagues we climb the stairs of one of the majestic buildings of Stanford University . We came to live near how scientists spread products in the developed world, where there was money for science and all its related magnificence. Anxiety climbing with every step of climb those stairs spotless marble. Our amazement was interrupted suddenly when talking with librarians and publishing houses as colleagues HighWire , we realized that the American system of scientific production was in crisis and that the solution seemed to be open access, ie, spreading books, articles magazines, and other knowledge products and unrestricted free mode via the Internet. How curious! The developed world started talking about open access when Latin America was already effective for some time. We found it ironic that America open access to knowledge as a solution to an economic problem, while in Latin America the main motivation was to democratize knowledge as healthy effect of our nascent democracies ... To solve the economic crisis of the subscription model, the Western countries created collegial institutions as Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) in 1997, which saw open access   opportunity . In parallel, in Latin America and the Caribbean was signed in 1998, the Declaration of San Jose for which 31 countries pledged to build aVirtual Library in Health Sciences collaboratively to provide 'greater access to information for continuous improvement of the health of our people.' This platform is kept in operation until today.  The statement is based on a tradition of open digital libraries in the region. The digital repository of literature in health sciences Brazilian ' SciELO' fully worked since 1998. Also the same year, make your CLASCO Virtual Libraries Network , which provides access to the scientific output of 324 member centers in 25 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2002 creates Redalyc , Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America and the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal, other transnational cooperative venture also offers a bibliometric system to evaluate the impact of scientific production. In the same year, the world proclaims the 'Budapest Open Access Initiative.' But we had already moved from thought to action before ..."