Open access is about access and re-use, but it is also about being able to contribute and participate in global conversations - developing region concerns

Editor's Notes

• #2: For a moment we go to Latin America. Our observations are based on our experience of 15 years with both, OA journals and repositories. When thinking about the future of global OA, we need that those local and regional research outputs, many times related to local and regional research agendas, also be part of the global conversations.
• #3: I will share some information about the current policy and practice of OA in Latin America, a region where research and scholarly communications costs are mainly government-funded. We are concerned with the “pay to publish” model, and I will share a few challenges for repositories to be a main component of the global research communication ecosystem: as publishing platforms, as providers of indicators for evaluation and as facilitators of open research.  
• #4: We share the visions of ICSU and of the Global Research Council about the importance of minimizing the barriers for contribution and research collaboration. One of the key findings in the Review of Implementation of the Global Research Council Open Access Action Plan, is the need to maximize the progress and benefits of open access, and to minimize any barriers to international research collaboration These visions have diverse implementation strategies
• #5: In Latin America research is mainly gov-funded, open access journals and repositories coexist very well, in both cases managed by the scholarly community and with costs covered with government support. Repositories are developed as the preferred option for implementing national open access policies. Concerning journals, in our region there is widespread adoption of OA, estimated at 85%, in all cases journals are published by universities and other research organisations, with no tradition of APC´s , with no outsourcing to commercial publishers. To increase visibility, access and quality of these journals in digital format and open access, several scholarly led initiatives were developed in Latin America and also in other developing regions.
• #6: These are examples of journal platforms, managed with public funds and international cooperation, these platforms offer to academic and research journals a way to provide OA to their journals, improving visibility and access, and provide indexing services and starting with OA indicators. A main contribution of these platforms has been to improve quality of journals, because they only accept journals that comply with international quality standards, and it is slowly starting to have an impact on research evaluation.
• #7: We also see a growing number of universities using the Open Journal Systems free software, to manage the transition of the editorial process from print to digital and open access, working to improve quality and internationalization of the journals, here we see examples from main research univ. LA, each with its own journal collection.
• #8: These collaborative cost-sharing developments in Latin America now are faced with a new reality, APC´s brings new business opportunities in the world and we have to be aware of unintended consequences. Who is being included and who is being excluded from this model of “pay to publish”.
• #9:  We are concerned for unprivileged countries/institutions/researchers. international APC´s, even with discounts, have no relation with the average salaries and research grants in developing countries. We anticipate a new enclosure, this time from within OA. On the side of repositories
• #10: I wish to address three challenges for our discussion about the role of repositories in shaping the future of OA,
• #12: In an open research environment, where publishing and sharing is a continuous process, how are we going to manage and reward the peer-review process of contents other than journal articles? How will that process of peer-review be described in the metadata?. And we need to reorganize and redirect funding to implement OA policies that require repositories
• #13: Because in our case, as in other countries, OA national legislation being approved requires OA repositories for publicly-funded research
• #14: And could INASP, EIFL, UNESCO, the Global Research Council and other agencies help build an agreement with publishers so that developing regions authored and co-authored articles are exported once embargoes are over? Because individual and inst negotiations are very difficult
• #15: We also need repositories to provide indicators because when research output is evaluated in developing regions a considerable part of research produced in those regions is made invisible because it is not published in the set of journals considered by WoS + IF, we need to complement with new indicators reflecting new realities.
• #16: It would help if international consensus is built on which OA indicators can be used to complement the traditional indicators. Moving from evaluation based on the journal where we publish, to evaluation based on the quality of individual contributions, and its relevance and impact. As the DORA declaration recommends. Evaluators need to be trained and rewarded for dedicating time to evaluation. Here is an example of a book recently published together with Unesco, PKP, Scielo and Redalyc. In several countries of our region, Scielo indicators are used complementing traditional WoS indicators
• #17: And finally the challenge for repositories to facilitate open and collaborative research
• #18: We are used working in repositories with the final products (journal article, book chapter, final research report) but our repositories are now challenged by new formats resulting from continuous publishing during the collaborative research process, with diversity of digital outputs, that require metadata to identify levels of quality, reuse licences, and other metadata not present today in the majority of our repositories.
• #19: These 3 roles can be encouraged by funding and research organisations to support OA as a global cost-sharing network of scholarly led repositories and publishing platforms, and on top of this “free to read-free to publish” OA repositories and publishing platforms, payed value-added services can be offered by profit and non-profit service providers
• #20: We have received reports on publishers perceptions of future directions scholarly communications. We need to have a similar update international report on the research and scholarly community perceptions of future directions in research communications and the role of repositories, a challenge that could be coordinated by COAR and SPARC. There is a growing number of international research programs with participation of researchers from many countries, eg: climate change, epidemics, sustainable development, future earth. It is the ideal context to experiment next generation repositories, a global challenge from COAR that needs support, as well as their program for repositories interoperability. Interesting times