Empowering academy-owned non-APC Open Access publishing to achieve participatory and sustainable scholarly communications

Latin America has kept a strong tradition in Open Access, as a natural way to disseminate knowledge in a cooperative manner, where neither author fees nor subscriptions have been involved. Academic institutions, in this region, are in charge of publishing journals in such a way that each institution’s investment mutually benefits all other institutions and society in general. This kind of informal cooperative was already operational before the term “open access” was even coined.

However, the international research assessment strategies based on rankings and journal-based metrics from the so-called mainstream databases have led scientific output from Latin America and from other developing regions to be considered peripherical with marginal visibility and recognition.

The current response from commercial publishers to Open Access is transferring subscription costs to author fees (APC), a strategy materialized in transformative agreements. This circumstance causes at least three negative effects: first, the exclusion of researchers to participate in publishing due to lack of resources, second, the deviation of the money away from the academic sector and the last but not least, the risk of rupture of the non-commercial and cooperative ecosystems.

Some of the questions that arise when trying to build a more neutral, equitable, and inclusive space for scholarly communications include: Are technologies capable of contributing to achieve a healthier system or could they level the playing field in the benefit the non-commercial sector? What might be the response of stakeholders from non-commercial publishing?

Leveraging this approach of science as a common and public good, Redalyc -an index and repository for the highest quality journals- and AmeliCA -a recently organized cooperative for Open Science- provide technology and services for more than 1,500 scientific journals. The pillars of this model are the following features: academy-owned publishing, immediate Open Access, not-for-profit, cooperative-based sustainability and technology-leveraged.

The technology and services offered for free by Redalyc and AmeliCA, to journals that meet the criteria, contribute to significant savings in costs and time-reduction in journal production processes; it allows to keep journal publishing in hands of the academic, non-profit sector; it enables native Open Access and Open Data; it helps to prevent journals from charging APC; it enables bibliodiversity; it leverages AI-aided software that automates typesetting and journal output files generation (ePUB, HTML5, PDF, XML); it is Linked Open Data compliant.

The aim of Redalyc/AmeliCA model is to achieve organic visibility, discoverability and impact of science as a product of an innovative and complex information processing, taking scientific content to a higher level of structuring and semantics that enable them to be connected to a wider and unrestricted knowledge cloud beyond commercial solutions.

Key words

non-APC, publishing, Open Access, Redalyc, AmeliCA