The value of the scholarly-led, non-profit business model to achieve Open Access and scholarly publishing beyond APC: the AmeliCA's cooperative approach

Keynote presentation. 
The prevailing science communication system has showed little success in making science a global, participatory and equitable conversation. At the same time, a very robust ecosystem of science communication has been built in the Latin-American region, one that is intrinsically open, non-commercial and academy-owned. However, this “regional” approach has remained outside the legitimated channels of scholarly communication. 
In Latin America, more than 2000 universities are publishing journals under the principle of science as a common and public good. Around half of them are public institutions which means that public budget is being heavily invested in sustaining non-commercial Open Access. 
AmeliCA, a multi-institutional community-driven initiative supported by UNESCO and led by Redalyc and CLACSO, seeks a cooperative, sustainable, protected and non-commercial solution for Open Knowledge. AmeliCA is taking the 16-year experience and technological resources from Redalyc to strengthen non-profit publishing beyond the region. 
AmeliCA’s and Redalyc’s approach is based on the fact that scholarly communication in control of the academy is a strategy much healthier and sustainable for the development of science and society. Why is it that commercial publishers are a pivotal actor in science communication – in many parts of the world – if the biggest part of activities concerning the generation of knowledge is in the academy? 
Academy owned publishing seems not to exist in the mainstream databases (Web of Science and Scopus). So, it is strategic for the research community and libraries to join forces, as well as share and connect individual efforts to build a cooperative infrastructure, in order to guarantee that publishing is led by the scholarly community and that its openness is sustainable. The research community and libraries should also work together in the reshaping of how research is assessed, in order to give the non-profit academy-owned scholarly communications their place. All must be leveraged with technology to find more effective methods of communication and deployment of the knowledge generated by different regions, disciplinary fields or languages.

Every institution supports journals that are driven by their own faculty members, and then that content is made available in OA. Everyone gets benefit from everyone's investment.
A fee has not been included neither for authors nor for readers in the regional editorial tradition.
.. from editorial services .. to publishers .. to analytics ? The cost of communicating scientific research is a tiny fraction of the cost of research, somewhere between 1% and 2%. So why should we ask that particular phase of the research cycle to obey financial rules couched in terms of "sustainability" while the overwhelming part of scientific research has to be constantly subsidized?

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Who sustain the non-profit publishing in Latin America?

Academy-owned journals in Scopus
Academy-owned publishing seems not to exist in the mainstream databases Large publishers enjoy economies of scale which makes them companies "too big to fail" and can be considered natural monopolies that have acquired a market power that impedes competition.
They reach an optimum production level to produce more at lower cost. However, the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) enables the stage for breaking that power.

"Too big to fail"
ICT has the potential to redraw the landscape, and thus bring new possibilities for other models to be competitive and even disruptive… will we be prepared for it?

Non-APC tradition in LatAm
Source: DOAJ Now a global flip is being intended based on a transformation from a pay-to-read to a pay-topublish strategy.
However, the control of science will continue in the hands of corporations.

Non-APC model in LatAm
How could Latin America and other developing regions participate in the global scientific conversation when restrictions change from reading to publishing?
The APC model brings a risk of widening the gap between Latin American research and international publication; as well as a risk of breaking the open nature of scientific communication system in Latin America.

Risks of the influence of APC in LatAm
• In a government-funded scientific communication system, where non-APC publication is a fact and sustainability is driven by public resources, which are the advantages in adopting a model to charge author fees?
• Wouldn't it be a risk of discouragement of governments and public institutions to keep supporting scientific research and publication?
• Wouldn't it be a risk of discouragement of non-profit Open Access platforms like Redalyc to keep strengthening publications?
• Could journals become self-sufficient through APCs in a region with no funds in research projects to publish results?

Challenges Prevailing prestige construction
The best ranked publications are usually for-profit and the research assessment systems reward publishing in them.
Quantitative metrics cannot replace qualitative evaluation, nor can they make the contributions of local research visible.
It is critical to understand that the Journal Impact Factor has a number of well-documented deficiencies as a tool for research assessment.
Exclusive and deficient research assessment Latin America, publications in Redalyc 650,000 articles in 1,300 journals 620 publishers (universities and academic societies) from 22 countries They are no-fee journals and free of cost platforms but they need funding to continue publishing and to be competitive