Dominique Babini's presentation discusses CLACSO's 15-year journey in promoting open access in social sciences across Latin America, highlighting their non-commercial ecosystem and the prevalence of open access within member institutions. CLACSO has published 400 journals, with 70% being open access, and hosts a digital repository with significant monthly downloads of scholarly works. The document emphasizes the importance of equitable access to research, contrasting local and international publishing dynamics, and the potential risks of integrating open access into commercial models.

1. Radical Open Access Conference -
Latin America social sciences open access
experience and perspective
Dominique Babini, CLACSO
.

2. in this presentation
• CLACSO- Latin American Council of Social Sciences
experience with open access
• CLACSO´s vision of a non-commercial global open
access ecosystem
• Latin America´s non-commercial open access
tradition
• The risk of open access being integrated into existing
commercial publishing

3. CLACSO – social sciences network
• since 1967
• Membership: 382 social science institutions in 22 countries of
Latin America and Caribbean
• Promotes and supports
– collaborative research: 2.000 researchers participating in
CLACSO´s 50 regional research groups
– dialogue of research with policies and social movements
– among former members of CLACSO: 20 ministers in the
region, Evo Morales/García Linera (president, vice-
president Bolivia), F.Henrique Cardoso (former president
Brazil), Ricardo Lagos (former president Chile), Danilo
Astori (former vice-president Uruguay)
www.clacso.org

4. CLACSO´s journey of 15 years in open access
– Promotion of open access initiatives, debates and policies
– 400 journals published in CLACSO´s member institutes
 today, 70% are in OA
– cooperative social science digital repository
 850.000 monthly downloads of full-texts
– editorial catalog: 1.535 books
 99% in OA

5. CLACSO´s bookstore: books can be downloaded for free from the
digital repository, and you can purchase print-on-demand version

6. CLACSO´s social science cooperative repository:
850.000 monthly full-text downloads

7. CLACSO´s social sciences digital repository
contents: 38.000 full-texts in open access
Mainly books+book chapters (44%) and articles (25% with
Redalyc)

8. CLACSO´s vision of a global non-commercial open
access
managed by the scholarly community
as a commons
 No fees to read
 No fees to publish

9. secure basic open access
(no fee for users, no fee for publishing)
• Research output in shared
interoperable open access digital
repositories
– institutional
– national
– regional
– international
– thematic
– journal repositories (70% journals do not
charge APC´s)
payed value-
added
services by
repositories,
overlay
journals,
megajournals,
epijournals,
publishers,
data portals,
peer-review
services,
impact
services, etc.

10. Latin American social sciences context
• links between social science research
and policies in Latin America are strong
• research and publishing is mainly
government-funded
• scholarly publishing not outsourced to
commercial publishers
• open access managed by the scholarly
community in local/regional venues
with no APCs / BPCs:
– Open access journal portals
– Open access repositories
• Institutional
• subject

11. Where social sciences are published
eg. : 414 full-time social science researchers CONICET
Argentina (period 2004-2008)
• Sociology: 83% articles are published in journals within the
region, 90% of books published within the country
• Political science: 80% articles published in journals within
the region, 84% of books published within the country
• Economics: 68% articles published in journals within the
region, 82% of books published within the country
http://redc.revistas.csic.es/index.php/redc/
article/viewFile/705/781

12. global/local tension in social science publishing
and evaluation systems
local/regional conversations
Publishing in
Spanish/Portuguese in
local/regional journals+books
 Larger local/regional
visibility and access
 Reduced international
visibility
 Negative impact on
evaluation
International conversations
Publishing in English in
international journals
 Reduced local/regional
visibility and access
 Larger international
visibility
 Rewarded when evaluated
Most used alternative: publish in local/regional journals with title/abstract
/kewords in local + English language
High cost alternative: publish in both local/English language

13. social science open access publishing in Latin
America
• open access journals
– journal website + national portals + regional portals
• repositories (institutional + national + regional + subject)
Open access national policies mandate OA in repositories
(national legislation approved in Peru, Argentina, Mexico; still in Congress in Brazil
and Venzuela)

14. OA managed in Latin America by the scholarly
community sharing costs, with no APC´s/BPC´s
now faces
trends of international open access
being integrated into commercial
publishing

15. we have to make an ongoing series of
decisions all of the time…
we have to think about who is being included
and who is being excluded…….
….. what seems open to us today, we have to
ask ourselves …will this seem open
tomorrow?
John Willinsky
Opening Science to Meet Future Challenges, 11 March 2014, Warsaw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jODzw_5q7EU

16. Dominique Babini – CLACSO, Open Access Program
University of Buenos Aires/IIGG – Open Access research
@dominiquebabini
dasbabini@gmail.com
Thank you!!!!