Open Access Dynamics in Latin America: Insights from the Chilean case | SciELO Preprints

Abstract:  Free access to research articles has been a key objective of an important part of scientific community around the world. In the past 20 years this debate has been fueled by researchers and agencies from Europe, and the discussion therein has propagated to the rest of the world, which includes declarations, initiatives and public policies. Latin-America resolved this problem very early, even before open access concept was coined, with the creation of SciELO network. However, the European discussion and the main proposal emerged there, to follow the gold route, has arrived to Latin-American countries bypassing the SciELO initiative. Chile is a good proxy to study the behavior of Latin-America research system during this discussion. We have analyzed the research literature leaded by Chilean authors, from 2011 to 2023. We have found that there is a fast-growing number of articles in the gold open access model in English language, which apparently has grown at expenses of SciELO articles. The main driver of this growth has been articles in Natural Sciences journals, and in two specifically for-profit editorials: MDPI and Frontiers. Citation metrics indicate that gold articles have mediocre visibility, below other models of open access. The total cost in APC spent by Chilean research has been calculated in 9 millions USD just for 2023, which gives an idea of the cost of adhere to European model in a country that already have a solution to open access, SciELO, which is mainly based diamond open access journals, free of cost to authors and to readers. We hope these results serve to public policy discussion at local, regional and even worldwide level, given that an important number of European researchers have seen SciELO as an example of alternative to the expensive gold model impulsed by Plan S.