Open Access Policies in Latin America: Regional Initiatives and International Recognition Between Excellence and Social Justice

Abstract

Information policies are the guidelines, regulations, laws and practices that govern the management, access, distribution, use and protection of information within a specific organization, nation or entity to ensure that information is used effectively, safely and ethically, including personal data, digital communications, media and information security. Such policies include regulating access to academic and research information resources. The issue of OA must be considered as a decisive element in terms of social concern, equity in the circulation of knowledge and as an essential element for a more just social development. Current policies assume that, in today's world, individuals are free from collective responsibility for their countries, but this is not true, since individuals are born, live and work in specific places, communities and countries, and most of the world's population lives in the global South. It is therefore necessary to be able to collaborate and improve quality, but it is also necessary to produce in a way that benefits both local communities and the world at large.

Since the late 1990s, Latin America has more than 30 digital journal collections, most of them public. Universities and research centers have invested efforts and resources in implementing these tools, showing a new way of producing and disseminating research results through the digital medium. Information policies have thus favored full-text OA, while the institutions themselves have financed these distribution channels to gain more visibility through more citations for authors, seeking greater impact for their research. Even before the main declarations of the global OA movement were made, the region had already considered the possibility of creating national collections of digital full-text OA journals. According to Latindex data, for every five Ibero-American scientific journals, one is currently available digitally in OA.