Actual and potential open access to scientific output in a specific country. A case study in Argentina.

[Nancy Gómez]

This work shows that "There are extremely favourable conditions for Argentina to include a significant share (69%) of its scientific production in Scopus, freely available through OA. This production is published in journals that adhere to some form of OA, in a ratio of 25% for the golden route (“real open access”) and 44% for the green route (“potential access”). In a comparisonof this 25% for the golden route to the 8.5% encountered by Björk et al. (2010) on an article-per-article basis verification at a world level, the figures for Argentina triple; this represents a considerably positive difference for
the country. The reasons may be found in a Latin American trend towards the golden route, such as pointed out by Miguel et al. (2011) or, alternatively, they may lie in the fact that we have assumed that all articles are free, which has not been verified (some OA journals in SciELO and RedALyC are subject to embargo periods from 6 months to 1 year). Another study should be carried out to confirm or contradict these findings.

The results provide useful knowledge for repository mana- gers at academic and research institutions to promote the green route. At the same time, authors should be made aware of the possibility of providing legal open access through self-archiving their post-prints. Unawareness of permissions granted by publishers is one of the main obs- tacles for authors’ self-archiving practices (Swan; Brown, 2005). Increasing the number of articles (above all, the final publisher’s version) with self-archiving permissions should be negotiated with publishers."