LA Referencia – South American Open Science network

Can an international network of repositories such as LA Referencia also be a platform for sharing know-how and best practices in scholarly communication between publishers, editors, authors, etc.?

Since we are a technical platform, our focus is to provide a valuable harvesting service and search options, and to improve the quality of the presented information (in many aspects: content, metadata, relevant statistics, etc.).

However, LA Referencia is also a community where we communicate the advances in public policies in the region, we give support to each associate participating in our community, and we discuss the best strategies for achieving our goals. We also participate in international initiatives like COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) and we are constantly analyzing the most appropriate options for training activities for 2015–2016.

Is there any visible increase in scientific cooperation between researchers from LA Referencia member states? Are there tools for measuring such cooperation?

We do not have any specific tools on our platform for measuring cooperation. Usually, the traditional method is to look at joint publications or projects. The first method is used by some of the associates of LA Referencia at the regional or national level, using different sources. Examples include, among others, WoS,  Scopus, SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library On Line), or studies made by SciMAGO in Spain or RICYT in the Latin-American region.

Open repositories are an e-infrastructure for Green Open Access. Is Green OA preferred to Gold OA in the member states of LA Referencia?

I do not think, personally, that the issue is Green vs. Gold as a preferred route in the Latin American context. The main issue is about national strategies to support Open Access in a comprehensive way; these should be aligned with S&T policy.

At the risk of oversimplification, I would say that to me it seems that for some actors in developed countries the debate on Green vs. Gold is formulated as an alternative: either subsidies for Open Access APC charges – as the way to solve visibility or sustain the so-called “viable transition” of business models – or a repository strategy. I think we should explore different alternatives and combinations; we should introduce more complexity, taking national or regional contexts into account; we should evaluate the impact of different variables of each approach. Just to give a small example: in some countries, national repositories for science and innovation are due to the country S&T policy.

The principle is simple: to make scientific results openly available to all citizens, especially in the case of research that was financed by public funds. However, there are no “silver bullets” to achieve this.

In the region, we must remember, there are some countries that strongly support Green Open Access infrastructures and, at the same time, strongly support the edition of national journals in open access with quality standards. Also, we must remember that the majority of journals edited in the region are open access journals which charge either no APCs at all or very small APCs.

In fact, the presence of Open Access in terms of scientific repositories and journals is now very strong in Latin America. Directories like OpenDOAR show this. Also, DOAJ shows a production not reflected in traditional research outputs, in services such as Scopus or WoS. This regional specificity, with an impressive amount of open access results, can be explained by the lack of commercial editors, governmental support, the influence of SciELO, and cultural factors, among others.

A good overview of this situation can be found in the appropriate studies1.

There is a law on Open Access in Argentina since November 2013. Are there other Open Access policies in the member states or in individual research institutions?

Yes, in 2013 a national legislation was passed in Peru. And in 2014, in Mexico. It is a unique development because these are national legislations, not instituted by specific research councils or funds. There are also important universities implementing open mandates.

This year we will probably see the passing of a national legislation in still another country. The important point is that it seems that there is a special development in our region: it is governments that decide to adopt explicit open access policies (see: Mexico, Peru, Argentina).

How many publications are accessible under open licenses, i.e. CC BY? How popular is libre OA in South America?

It is difficult to give an exact figure. But we are quite sure that this is a region with a relatively high proportion of Open Access journals compared with other continents. I will quote a study by Juan Pablo Alperin: “Estimates on the extent of OA in developing regions vary significantly. In Latin America, these estimates range from a low 51% of all online journals being OA to a high 95% depending on the source of the data used. In the Scopus database, 74% of all Latin American journals are OA, compared with the global total of 9% (Miguel et al., 2011)”. After discussing other studies, Alperin  concludes, “But, even these varied estimates suggest much higher levels of OA participation than other regions of the world, especially in Latin America, at least in comparison to the global totals in the studies cited above and to other global estimates of OA, which are estimated around 20% (Laakso & Björk, 2012; Laakso et al., 2011)”.

The use of CC licenses is well established in scientific journals in the region.

Open Access is, in essence, a global model. Do you follow the development of the European Open Access infrastructure, e.g. OpenAIRE? Are LA Referencia solutions compatible with it?

We follow its development and we believe that we must have standards for global interoperability. Driver 2 was a huge step and decision. Now we are analyzing the OpenAIRE 3.0 Guidelines for Literature Repositories  which represent an evolution of the Driver Guidelines. We will actually be part of the OpenAIRE2020 project. We will take part in one of the work packages – the one oriented towards the alignment of international repository networks. In the next two years we will have a special focus on analyzing and adopting some aspects of the OpenAIRE Guidelines, in order to increase interoperability at a global level.

1. Chinchilla-Rodríguez, Zaida, Sandra Miguel and Félix Moya-Anegón, Influencia del acceso abierto en las revistas de América Latina en el contexto internacional de la ciencia.In Bibliotecas y Repositorios Digitales: Gestión del conocimiento, Acceso Abierto y Visibilidad Latinoamericana, Bogotá (Colombia), Mayo 9 al 11 de 2011, SCImago Research Group 2011, http://publicaciones.renata.edu.co/index.php/RCEC/article/download/93/pdf.

Babini Dominique, Scientific Output from Latin America and the Caribbean – Identification of the Main Institutions for Regional Open Access Integration Strategies, 2012 [Report], http://eprints.rclis.org/19085/.

Alperin, Juan Pablo, Open Access Indicators. Assessing Growth and Use of Open Access Resources from Developing Regions. The Case of Latin America (pp. 15–82). In Alperin, J.P.; Babini, D; Fischman, G. (Eds.), Open Access Indicators and Scholarly Communications in Latin America, 1a ed. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: CLACSO; Buenos Aires: Unesco, 2014.E-Book, http://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/clacso/se/20140917054406/OpenAccess.pdf.

This material is under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

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