FOCUS ON OPEN SCIENCE

CHAPTER XXXVI: LATIN AMERICA

                                                              scholarly communication    

Wouter Schallier

Wouter Schallier is Chief of the Hernán Santa Cruz Library of UN/ECLAC (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), in Santiago de Chile. 

Wouter Schallier has a Master's degree in "Linguistics and Literature: Latin and Greek", a Diploma in "Medieval Studies" and a Master’s in "Information and Library Sciences".

Wouter Schallier started his professional career at K.U.Leuven University, Belgium, first as coordinator of several innovation projects and 3 years later as Director of the Library of Medicine and Pharmacy.

Between 2008 and 2012, Wouter Schallier was Executive Director of LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries), in The Hague, The Netherlands. In this position he secured funding from the European Commission for 7 projects in the following areas: Europeana digital library, access to scientific information resources, open access, digital preservation, and research data management.

As Chief of the Hernán Santa Cruz (ECLAC) Library, Wouter Schallier introduced a strategy to radically modernize the services and products of the Library. In 2014, the Hernán Santa Cruz Library launched the ECLAC Digital Repository  (https://repositorio.cepal.org/), which provides open access to all publications of the Regional Commission, from 1948 until now. After an ambitious renovation project, the new physical spaces of the Hernán Santa Cruz Library were inaugurated in 2016.

Between 2015 and 2017, Wouter Schallier led the Latin American and Caribbean work packages of the LEARN project  (www.learn-rdm.eu) on Research Data Management, financed by the European Commission. The main objective of this project was to support the implementation of data management policies in research institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean. 

Since 2021, Wouter Schallier has also been in charge of ECLAC's Web Services Unit with the aim of implementing a comprehensive knowledge management strategy.

Wouter Schallier publishes and regularly presents talks on the following topics: Open Access, Open Science, access to information, innovation and scholarly communication.

Dr. Paul Ayris, University College London, UK

Dr Ayris is Pro-Vice-Provost (LCCOS – Library, Culture, Collections and Open Science) in UCL (University College London). He joined UCL in 1997.

Dr Ayris was the President of LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) 2010-14. He was Chair of the LERU (League of European Research Universities) INFO Community for 10 years, ending in 2020. He also chaired OAI12 – The Geneva Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication. He is a member of the UUK High-Level Strategy Group on E-Resource purchasing for the Jisc community. He has served two terms of office as a member of the President’s and Provost’s Senior Management Team in UCL. In 2015, Dr Ayris launched UCL Press as the UK’s first fully Open Access University Press and in 2020 both the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship and the UCL Research Institute for Collections.

Dr Ayris has a Ph.D. in Ecclesiastical History and publishes on English Reformation Studies. In 2019, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Presentation:

A Next Generation University Press: UCL Press as a model for Open Science publishing

This paper will look at the foundation of UCL Press in 2015 as the UK’s first fully Open Access University Press. The drivers for its creation will be examined, and its three current publishing platforms described in detail: research monographs, journals, and a new Open platform for multi-disciplinary work, starting with UCL: Open Environment.  The paper will look at the impact this new publishing venture has had, in terms of access to content, innovation, and the shaping of academics’ expectation and ambitions for their research and educational outputs.

Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen, National Library Finland

Director, Library Network Services, National Library of Finland 2000–

Adviser of LIBER (2018–2020), President 2014–2018, vice-president 2010–2014

Member of DORA (The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) advisory committee 2018–2021

Member of the Open Science Policy Platform, European Commission 2016–2018, 2018–2020

Member of the Digital Heritage Expert Group, European Commission 2017-2021

Member of the Finnish Open Science strategy group 2017–2020

Member of the Finnish Publication Forum steering group 2020-2023

Member of the steering committee of the Research information hub - a new window into Finnish research 2017–2020

Member of the steering committee of the Finnish Open Science and Research Initiative 2014–2017 Member of the National Digital Library steering committee 2010–2017

Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen is the director of Library Network Services at the National Library of Finland (NLF). She is a director who leads the development of national infrastructure services for HE institutions, public libraries, archives, museums, and other public sector institutions.

The Library Network Services provides national infrastructure services for libraries, archives, museums and for the public sector as a whole. The services can be divided into two main categories:1) services that improve access to information and 2) metadata and bibliographic services as well as interoperability services.

She is the former President and adviser of LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries. Fostering Open Science is a priority of LIBER, which represents 400+ research libraries across 40 countries in Europe. LIBER has been actively fostering Open Science especially in the fields of Open Access, Research Data Management, FAIR Data, Digital Humanities, as well as leadership and skills development. Advocacy related to the copyright reform, raising awareness, building strategic partnerships and being active in EU projects related to Open Science are also among the duties of LIBER.

Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen has been a member of the Open Science Policy Platform of the European Commission. She is the only person representing libraries in the expert group. The OSPP consists of 25 high-level representatives of European Open Science stakeholders. The OSPP has published a final report in 2020.

She has been a member of steering committees of the Open Science and Research Initiative as well as the National Digital Library in Finland. The Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture coordinated the Open Science and Research Initiative (ATT) for the term 2014–2017. The objective was for Finland to become one of the leading countries in Open Science and Research.

The National Digital Library of Finland developed the availability and usability of digital cultural heritage; preservation of digital cultural heritage; digitisation of cultural heritage and collaboration between libraries, archives, and museums. The National Library of Finland is responsible for the development of the National Discovery Service Finna (finna.fi). Based on external evaluation, Finna has been the most successful of the NDL services.

Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen has extensive national and international networks related to Open Science; open discovery and digital cultural heritage.

Presentation:

Open Access Infrastructures in Finland

Open Science is coordinated in Finland at National level. Research organisations are responsible for the implementation of actions. Finland has national infrastructures, which support Open Access publishing and access to content. The presentations gives an overview of these infrastructures.

Arianna Becerril García, Autonomous University of the State of Mexico

Full-time professor-researcher at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico (UAEM). Member of the National System of Researchers (SNI) of Mexico. She holds a PhD and MSc in Computer Science, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico. And she holds a BA in Computer Engineering, UAEM. She’s part of the founding team of the Scientific Information System Redalyc.org where she is the current Executive Director. Dr Becerril is founder and president of AmeliCA Conocimiento Abierto S.C. She’s co-founder of Red Mexicana de Repositorios Institucionales (“Mexican Network of Institutional Repositories”). She participated as part of the advisory team of the Open Access national legislation in Mexico in 2014. She’s currently a member of the the council of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). She has coordinated four projects supported by UNESCO, one of them is the ongoing  project "Open Access for Angola" in partnership with Universidade Oscar Ribas and the Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and Innovation of Angola.

Presentation:

Towards a Latin American non-commercial Open Science ecosystem in the hands of academia: The articulation of the green and diamond routes 

The Latin American region has a marked history of open circulation of scientific knowledge in control and ownership of the academic sector, sustained by public resources. Scientific publishing, for example, has a tradition of being open to readers and authors, and is strengthened by various initiatives, infrastructures, platforms, and other collective non-commercial Open Access (diamond route) efforts throughout the region.

For its part, the proliferation of self-archiving in institutional and thematic repositories, the so-called green route, has allowed books, theses, educational resources and many other formats of knowledge communication to increase their visibility in Open Access. Likewise, both routes and various components that allow their articulation, such as CRIS systems, can support the change in the culture of research evaluation.

The potential that this articulation entails in an ecosystem that impacts the rest of the pillars of Open Science is the alternative to the commercial market. The latter, a model where the circulation and valuation of science is carried out based on rules and concepts of the commercial sector. The ecosystem that makes up the green and diamond roads of OA carries by definition fundamental values to advance scientific communication, such as inclusion, multilingualism, diversity and participation as well as being a sustainable way and in control of the academic and scientific community.

Fernanda Beigel, National University of Cuyo, Argentina

Fernanda Beigel is a Sociologist, PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the National University of Cuyo  (Mendoza, Argentina). She completed her postdoctoral studies at the Centre de Sociologie Européenne (EHESS, Paris). She is Principal Investigator of CONICET and Professor at the National University of Cuyo, where she directs the Center for Studies of the Circulation of Knowledge (CECIC). She is an advisor to the Latin American Forum for Science Assessment (FOLEC-CLACSO) and the Advisory Group of DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment). He chaired Unesco's Committee of Experts on Open Science and participated in the Argentine Delegation at the UNESCO General Conference, where the Open Science

Recommendation was adopted in November 2021. She was rewarded the Bernardo Houssay Award (2003), First Prize CLACSO Essays Competition (2004) and the Honorable Mention for Scientific Value, Senate of the Argentine Nation (2017). 

Presentation:

Latin American scientific publications, tensions and challenges in the transition to open science

UNESCO's Open Science Recommendation, adopted in November 2021, proposes a global consensus on the values and actions of inclusive open science. The five main manifestations of this openness of science are: open access to scientific publications, open access to research data, open educational resources, open software and hardware. Promoting a culture of open science is a complex task that requires integrated information systems that allow us to know, promote and evaluate the universe of research productions and activities. 

Therefore, one of the main concerns raised in this Recommendation is that, even with its good intentions, open science could amplify the gap between more technologically advanced countries and poorer countries with precarious digital infrastructure. Thus, the unilateral growth of open science platforms in the dominant countries would not only increase inequalities in access to science but would also enable different forms of levy and commercialization of data from the periphery. 

This presentation will focus on the experience of scientific publishing in Latin America, which has a collaborative infrastructure that has been developing since the 1950s, consolidated in recent decades with indexing systems, repositories, and diamond access journals. The uniqueness of this region compared to other regions of the world is that most of the scientific journals it publishes are non-commercial and are self-managed by universities and scientific societies. Finally, the critical role of the region's evaluation systems in making these journals visible and recognized is discussed, promoting a more equitable path for open science.