Open Access Current Situation in Latin America

In today's post we review the situation in Latin America with respect to open access, scientific research and the low visibility of such research within the language barrier, and the little reach they get within the global academic community.

Current situation

Unlike other parts of the world, in Latin America, a large part of all scientific research is funded by the government. In addition, since it is carried out by the academic community, there is a lower level of hiring commercial publishers, which results in a system that shares information only in the local language (Spanish and Portuguese) and generates that such research does not obtain the international visibility that is necessary to be part of the global situation of science.

Besides what we mentioned before, we can find disciplines in this area where publications in English are also widely published in the region since its better for the evaluation process of researchers, but on the other hand, it lowers the visibility in the area, especially for those who do not speak the language.

Of the total number of journals or publications indexed by the Web of Science and Scopus, the main databases that provide data, citations, journals, and different documents from various academic disciplines, a minimal part of them are peer-reviewed publications from Latin America. Despite the internet, the web, and open access, the visibility of scientific research from Latin America has increased very slightly over the last few years.

Fortunately, open access is increasingly incorporated in the generation of quality journals, in addition to the participation of Latin American countries in non-commercial regional databases that help to generate online visibility, professionalize production and receive open access indicators.

Regional Cooperation on Digital Repositories

If we talk about one of the main non-commercial databases in Latin America, we are referring to Latindex, a regional online information system for scientific journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain, and Portugal. It has more than 2,600 quality journals from the region, of which about 1,500 of them can be found in Scielo and Redalyc, both open-access publishing platforms and government-funded non-commercial databases.

Latin America is a region with diverse problems and topics that require research, and in the last decade we can find a growing number of digital repositories that began being directed to theses or journal articles, but that grew to other formats in the field. That is why in order to encourage regional participation among the various digital repositories, the Inter-American Development Bank and RedCLARA, Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks, created ''La Referencia'', a network of open-access repositories in Latin America, which includes nine countries, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Spain, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay.

Challenges in Latin America and the World

It is necessary to mention the importance of achieving a global academic community, managed for the common good of all, participatory, and cooperative. Built on the basis of interoperable digital research repositories that include regional, national, and international levels, as well as thematic ones.

How can Orvium Contribute to this Situation?

Orvium is an Open Access article publishing platform that covers the three main publication channels: journals, conferences, and scientific repositories.

It allows publishers to manage the complete life cycle of scholarly articles. It allows the reception of articles, assignment of editors to articles, peer review, submission of articles to production, etc.

Within these communities we can find a lot of functionalities that will help to manage your scientific manuscripts:

• Accept new articles.
• Search for reviewers.
• Create your call for papers directly in your new community.
• Anti-plagiarism checks with iThenticate.
• Generate DOI (Crossref or DataCite).
• Contact with researchers and followers of citizen science.
• Auto-indexing with Google Scholar and OpenAIRE increases the visibility of your community.
• And much more!

With all these features that our platform offers, any country or region of the world, universities, companies, and/or research groups can create their community, upload their repositories, create conferences and connect with other researchers anywhere in the world, promoting communication and visibility within the global research community.

Start now to manage your new scientific journal or your next conference by creating your community in Orvium and inviting your colleagues using the following link https://dapp.orvium.io/.

Try our platform now and start enjoying all its benefits.

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