Redalyc

Background: Redalyc (Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y El Caribe, España y Portugal), launched in 2002 at the public Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, is a scientific information network that serves as an index of more than 1,700 open access journals from 800-plus institutions in 35 countries.

Mission: Redalyc provides a non-commercial infrastructure to advance Diamond Open Access, based on the paradigm of science as a public good. Redalyc is focused on keeping control of publishing within the academic community to ensure a sustainable scientific ecosystem that includes the voices of all who want to participate.

Community over Commercialization:

“We only work with journals that don’t charge authors or readers—those that are non-commercial and academic. We believe journals are public goods and that the communication of science works best when they are treated as such.”

“A critical lesson from the Latin American region is the deep-rooted tradition of working in the community and cooperatively. This has resulted in a robust non-profit ecosystem to support the circulation of knowledge where the community leads, controls, and owns the components of the scholarly communication system. This leaves no room for dependency on the commercial market and favors equity and inclusion, particularly for the Global South”

“After two decades of Open Access and the emergence of Open Science, commercial publishers have flipped their model to charge authors (APC) instead of readers. In that mercantile transaction, the return is to simply have an OA article. However, in the model of ‘science as public good,’ the community sustains journals and infrastructures, but with an incomparable return rate – no fees for authors or readers, no hidden restrictions around open content. The icing of the cake: the property of journals remains within the community, allowing the interest of the research community to prevail in the current and future course of scholarly communications in such a way that this public asset be inherited to new generations.”

“Science should be a public good. It can be sustained collectively and provide a universal benefit. In Latin America, resources from the academic and public sectors work together to sustain journals as public goods. Everybody invests in a piece of the ecosystem, and everybody benefits from the result. While this community-owned infrastructure is resilient, it is threatened by commercial practices such as “transformative agreements” that threaten to pull both resources and publications away from the academic sector.

“Challenges remain: to make visible the participation of the community of higher education institutions, governments, non-profit organizations, researchers in the sustainability of those public goods. Rarely do we find such contributions recognized in research assessment. Then, universities, for example, fall into the trap of traditional rankings which do not take care of equity, epistemic justice, inclusion, universality and other values of science that are inherent in public goods.”

-Arianna Becerril-García, executive director, Redalyc; professor UAEMéx