"Just last week, Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto announced via his official webpage the enactment of reforms to several federal law frameworks concerning science, technology and education that will allegedly 'insert Mexico into the Information and Knowledge Society' ... The legislative changes came about from a law reform initiative drafted by current Upper House vice-president
Ana Lilia Herrera Anzaldo. According to online
press releases and an
excellent information webpage on the reform process, a preliminary law initiative was presented in 14 March 2013 by Senator Herrera Anzaldo. A joint meeting with researchers and academics was held on 2 September 2013 and the original initiative was retracted ten days later. I presume this was done in order to amend it because of that meeting. A second meeting was then organised at the Upper House headquarters, which included input from top-level scientific policymakers, academics, and
UNESCO. A new initiative was presented to the Senate (a facsimile of the original plus an English translation can be found
here) that was presented to the Senate again by Herrera Anzaldo on 9 December and was turned for analysis to a select committee on science, technology and education. After approval by the committee it was voted and unanimously approved by the Senate on 5 March 2014, turned for review by the Lower House which also unanimously approved it a month later and finally sent off for the President’s signature into law ... It seems that, according the
information available online, a good number of OA stakeholders took part in the consultation process, including people from the online Latin America repository community (the
Scielo and
Redalyc portals), librarians, copyright experts and a good number of researchers and science policy people (including some very well known names in Mexican science). The legislative information portal had a ‘comments’ section of its own and for each new blog entry, to which Herrera Anzaldo paid some attention since she responded to a few of them. There was also ample use of tweeter and links to online petitions. Impressive.
Which is why I find it surprising that despite this sophistication, the legislative outcome could have come out being so utterly wrongheaded ... There is a very serious problem here in that, if one looks carefully at the wording, this is nowhere near a mandate. All it says is, really, that researchers can make their research available through a centralised repository that may or may not exist in the future. Although elsewhere in the publication there are entries related to the importance of institutional repositories, their promotion by local governments (e.g. Articles 2 and 64) and other sweet-sounding but ultimately empty blah, blah, blah, there is no discussion of what consequences – if any – there can be if researchers fail to comply. Let me just make the point again: these reforms do notconstitute a mandate ..."