Open access initiatives in the Global South affirm the lasting value of a shared scholarly communications system | SAGE Connection – Insight

"Developing countries stand to benefit greatly from a more open and equitable international scholarly communication system, but Dominique Babini argues new commercial enclosures to access are also emerging. The international community would do well to follow the examples of initiatives in Latin America, where open access is already the norm and where costs are shared among members of scholarly communities to ensure lasting impact. Open access and digital social sciences provide unique opportunities but also great challenges for the Global South social sciences to be more active participants in global conversations concerning sustainable development issues. Opportunities have grown because developing regions with growing internet connections can access worldwide research results without the paywalls imposed by commercial publishers, giving visibility and access to its own research output. Great challenges exist because to avoid new enclosures resulting from commercial open access proposals based on article processing charges (APC), the international research and scholarly community needs to address the issue of sharing costs to build a worldwide open access scholarly communications system supported by interoperable institutional, national and international digital repositories as a public good, retrieving the concept of knowledge as a commons. More of a SHARE approach than a CHORUS approach to the open access future, as I have recently mentioned in Richard Poynder´s interview. For regions such as Latin America, where research is mainly government-funded (either through local government funds, or through international cooperation funds from foreign tax-payers) and commercial publishers are absent, publishing costs have always been part of the cost of research, and journals and academic books have been published by universities and societies.  And more recently, State funds with international cooperation support have been the great enablers of open access, as I have described in the Latin America section of UNESCO´s Global Open Access Portal (GOAP). Open access national legislation has been approved in Peru, and is being debated in congress in Brazil (since 2007), in Argentina (since 2011, approved by Deputies and in debate in Senate) and in México (since 2013).  In all cases, legislation requires that government-funded research results be available in open access digital repositories ..."