The value of the scholarly-led, non-profit business model to achieve Open Access and scholarly publishing beyond APC

AmeliCA’s cooperative approach

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7557/5.4964
Keywords: academic publishing, scholar-led publishing, academic-led publishing, Open Access

Abstract

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.

Author Biography

Arianna Becerril-García, Redalyc

Dr. Arianna Becerril-García is Chair at Ameli, Open Knowledge for Latin America and the Global South (AmeliCA), Executive Director and co-founder of Redalyc.org, and Professor at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico.

Dr. Becerril-García has a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from “Tecnológico de Monterrey”, Mexico, a Master’s in Computer Sciences from the same institution, and a degree in Computer Engineering from the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico (UAEM). She is a member of the founding team of the Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal (redalyc.org) and is a full-time professor-researcher at the UAEM. She is also a member of the International Advisory Board of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and a co-founder of the Mexican Network of Institutional Repositories (REMERI). Dr. Becerril-García has published numerous papers in research journals, as well as three books, and has participated in more than 40 national and international conferences. Her research topics are open access, interoperability technologies, visibility of science, semantic web and linked data. Her recent works and international conferences are “A Semantic Model for Selective Knowledge Discovery over OAI-PMH Structured Resources”, Information (Switzerland, 2018); “The end of a centralized Open Access project and the beginning of a community-based sustainable infrastructure for Latin America: Redalyc.org after fifteen years”, ELPUB (Toronto, 2018), “The Open Access Model in Latin America”, COASP (Washington, DC, 2016); “Redalyc – ORCID integration: Inserting Latin-American authors in the global scientific conversation”, ORCID (Washington, DC, 2016).

Published
2019-09-23
Issue
No 1 (2019): The 14th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing 2019
Section
Presentations

Copyright (c) 2019 Arianna Becerril-García

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  • Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  • Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  • Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).