Ivonne Lujano ivonne@doaj.org

1. Open Access Journals in
Latin America: a DOAJ
ambassador’s perspective
Ivonne Lujano
ivonne@doaj.org

2. What is the DOAJ?
• a whitelist of over 12,000 OA scholarly journals
• curates OA titles in all disciplines and languages
• free to users and publishers
• funded by donations
• aims to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access academic
journals

3. Mission
DOAJ's mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage
and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research
journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language.
DOAJ will work with editors, publishers, journal managers and owners to help
them understand the value of best practice publishing and standards and apply
those to their own operations.
DOAJ is committed to being 100% independent and maintaining all of its services
and metadata as free to use or reuse for everyone.

5. Principles of Transparency and Best Practice
in Scholarly Publishing
doaj.org/bestpractice
Version 3, January 2018
1. Website
2. Name of journal
3. Peer review process
4. Ownership and management
5. Governing body
6. Editorial team/contact
information
7. Copyright and licensing
8. Author fees
9. Process for identification of and
dealing with allegations of research
misconduct
10. Publication ethics
11. Publishing schedule
12. Access
13. Archiving
14. Revenue sources
15. Advertising
16. Direct marketing

6. DOAJ Seal
1. have an archival arrangement in place with an external party.
2. provide permanent identifiers in the papers published
3. provide article level metadata to DOAJ
4. embed machine-readable CC licensing information in article level
metadata
5. allow reuse and remixing of content in accordance with a CC BY, CC BY-
SA or CC BY-NC license
6. have a deposit policy registered in a deposit policy directory.
7. allow the author to hold the copyright without restrictions.

7. Strategy for 2018 to 2020
First created: 21 December 2017
Last updated: 11 October 2018
Created by Dom Mitchell

8. A. Funding and sustainability
1. Secure a sustainable model of funding (SCOSS).
2. Establish how DOAJ remains relevant and valuable in the long term.
3. Improve our service and support to account holders of all types and sizes.

9. B. Functionality, stability and scalability
1. Ensure that the DOAJ platform remains available for at least 99% average
uptime for a calendar month.
2. Ensure the platform can meet the demands of continued growth of traffic to
the web site.
3. Add new features and functionality to improve the DOAJ user experience.

10. C. Education and outreach
1. Deliver DOAJ’s message in the context of cognitive justice for the Global
South.
2. Develop DOAJ’s education program across a variety of platforms and in
multiple languages.
3. Expand DOAJ’s international presence.

11. A situation, phenomenon, a policy or attitude that prevents students and
researchers to deploy the full potential of their research capacity in service
to local sustainable development.
Piron, F., Regulus, S., and Dibounje Madiba, M. S. (Éd.). (2016). Justice cognitive, libre accès et savoirs locaux. Pour une science
ouverte juste, au service du développement local durable Québec: Éditions science et bien commun. Retrieved from
https://scienceetbiencommun.pressbooks.pub/justicecognitive1/.
What is Cognitive Injustice?

12. DOAJ’s role in combating cognitive injustice?
• to facilitate access to accredited OA journals from the Global South
• to promote publication and usage of local knowledge.
• to disseminate information about OA to Southern scholars and
publishers
• to decrease the risk of publication with questionable publishers
• to support publishers in the Global South to publish OA
• to deliver the above through local peers

14. https://www.scidev.net/global/feature/the-ambassadors-for-open-access-standards-in-the-global-south.html

15. How is the OA publishing model in Latin America?
● Publicly funded
● Non APCs
● Published by universities and research institutions
● And since the late 1990s, the region has opened
access to research results through journal portals
and digital repositories such as Latindex, SciELO
and Redalyc.

16. “…many of the issues publishers face in Latin
America are fundamentally tied to inequalities
embedded in research and education systems.”

17. A spectre is haunting (Open Access)
Latin America...

18. In August of last year, science in Argentina was the subject of a symbolic funeral. Today
the situation tends to worsen. Image credit: Courtesy of Mónica Hasenberg for
SciDev.Net.

20. Neoliberalism in Science Communication
budgetary adjustments
program closures
Impact Factor-based policies

21. DOAJ applications from ‘Global South’ countries
Indian OA journals have submitted 2,578 requests since 2014 to be included in
the DOAJ; Brazil clocked in at 2,048 requests, while Indonesia ranks first with
3,662 requests.
But roughly half of the submissions get rejected, usually because of their low
quality.
A journal may be genuine but ill-informed about standards, or ill-equipped to
meet them.

22. DOAJ applications from ‘Global South’ countries
Brazil has had more success with its homegrown OA journals than India. Less
than 40 per cent of Brazilian OA journals are rejected on average, compared
to DOAJ’s overall 50-per-cent rejection rate.

24. Scholar
Editor
InstructorResearcher
Neoliberal policies of structural adjustment
• Growing job insecurity
• Challenges in digital journals’ edition
• Changes in evaluation systems
Pilloni, L. (2018) Working conditions of the editors of scientific journals in Mexico. Aspects of precariousness
in academic work. Available at:
https://figshare.com/articles/Condiciones_laborales_de_los_editores_de_revistas_cient_ficas_en_M_xico_Aspectos_de_la_precariedad_en_el_trabajo_ac ad_mico/6344864

27. I am the edior in chief of ”Colombian Journal of
Education”. How can I get more citations to be in
Q1?

28. I’m the editor of “Brzailian Journal of Medicine”.
We have to publish [more] in English how can we
do that?

29. I’m the editor of “Revista de X”. We want to use Creative Commons
licenses. We decided to use the CC-BY-NC-SA, how can we embed it in
all the issues we have published?

30. I’m the editor of X Journal of Pediatrics, we can’t
buy DOIs but we want to get the DOAJ seal, what
should we do?

31. Conclusion
● Editorial staff often lack the digital literacy necessary to use and adapt online
systems.
● They face language barriers to access concepts and tools that are only
available in English.
● There are staff shortages and budget constraints, symptoms of a system that
doesn’t offer substantial incentives for editorial work.
“In many cases the staff of a journal is [made up of] only one or two people
multitasking,”
https://www.scidev.net/global/feature/the-ambassadors-for-open-access-standards-in-the-global-south.html

32. Open Science?

33. Thank you
ivonne@doaj.org
@ivonnelujano