Scholarly Infrastructure: a Latin American perspective

"With the digitization of scholarship and the rise of the open research movement, new models and outputs of science communication have emerged  beyond the journal article. Scholarly communications is shifting towards the “record of versions”, rather than just a One True “version of record”, where persistent identifiers and their metadata enable recognition, linking and discoverability of a wide range of outputs regardless of where those are housed. It is worth noting the importance of infrastructure in connecting all outputs and resources throughout the research lifecycle (such as research data, software, samples, etc.) to better understand and evaluate the contributions to research, and support their recognition. Many of the organizations providing this kind of foundational infrastructure have been established as non profit community governed and sustained initiatives (Crossref, DataCite, ROR), and are committed to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure. ... Opposite to what happens in the Global North, in Latin America open access is not an “alternative” model but has long been mainstream. We have a long-term history of Open Access without APCs and are publicly funded. There are few reasons for this, one of which being the high cost of journal subscriptions in the 90s, which worked as a big motivator for the creation of free to access/publish electronic journals. Despite this Latin American open access tradition, in countries like Colombia, APC payments are increasing. Many voices in the community argue that transformative agreements might threaten the current local ecosystem as the more funds that are allocated for APCs diminish the investment in shared infrastructure and tools. When it comes to infrastructure, just being open might not be enough; operating infrastructure is not simple and requires investment, capacity building, maintenance, and dedicated staff committed that can ensure accessible, inclusive, and responsive tools. Resilience and sustainability are very sizable challenges that need to be addressed via governance.... A local solution in Latin America for this has been to have independent and self-sustainable organizations that not only publish research results but also fill a role in offering infrastructure and innovation options, training to improve research publishing and dissemination practices, allowing local communities to operate according to the state of the art in scholarly communications, such as SciELO (established in 1998 and celebrating its 25th anniversary with an international conference this year), Redalyc (2002), La Referencia (2010)....   In the end, open goes beyond access and  it’s indispensable for our community to question and rethink the ownership and diversity of research infrastructure. There is an urgent need to reclaim scholarly infrastructure if we want to pursue the benefit of the majority instead of the profit of few. There are many ways to play a more proactive role in steering research infrastructure: (choosing and) using open community-led infrastructure and services, through institutional membership, sharing use cases and feedback for improvement, participating in governance and working groups and more."