Why CLACSO supports open access in Latin America

[Dominique Babini]

In Latin America and the Caribbean, research is mainly publicly funded. However, access to the results of that research is hampered by limitations in traditional scholarly communication systems.

CLACSO-Latin American Council of Social Sciences, a non-governmental network of 542 research institutions and 650 postgraduate programs in 41 countries, partners with universities and governments of Latin America and the Caribbean in the promotion and development of strategies and initiatives that provide open access to research results in the region.

CLACSO works together with the regional initiatives Latindex, Redalyc, SciELO, La Referencia,UNESCO-GOAP, and with institutional repositories and university journal portals, to give visibility to research output from the region. All these initiatives are non-commercial and managed by the scholarly community.

The Council renews its support to those non-commercial institutional and regional scholarly initiatives mentioned above to give visibility and open access to research output from Latin America and the Caribbean, and hopes that governments in the region will continue giving their full support to strengthen these initiatives.

CLACSO promotes a model of open access to knowledge as a commons, managed in cooperative and inclusive models by the scholarly community, and supports this position in the international debate on a renewal of scholarly communications.  See CLACSO´s Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge managed as a Commo....  And CLACSO´s activities in support of Open Access are described here.  

In a region where open access initiatives mentioned above are managed by the scholarly community, the Council sees with great concern proposals from international commercial publishers to manage open access of Latin American journals.

Pablo Gentili, Executive Secretary

Fernanda Saforcada, Academic Director

Dominique Babini, Open Access Campaign, contact: [e-mail]