Breaking the glass Latin America is a leader in nonprofit open-access journals. But it struggles to give them global visibility
Breaking the glass
Latin America is a leader in nonprofit open-access journals. But it struggles to give them global visibility
Source: Science
In 2016, Marcus Oliveira, a biochemist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, submitted a study on the metabolism of a tropical parasite to a mainstream open-access journal based in the United States. It was the ninth paper he had published in the journal, for which he had also volunteered time as a peer reviewer for dozens of articles. But this time he could not afford the $1200 article-processing charge (APC), as his grant funding was nearly depleted. He requested the fee waiver the journal says it offers to authors from lower income countries, but the negotiations were tense. “I felt morally assaulted,” he says. “At some point, the journal requested I send them a personal bank statement to prove I didn’t have the means.”
In the end he got the waiver, but the experience turned him away from commercial journals published in the Global North and toward a model that has flourished in Latin America: nonprofit open-access journals. These publications, usually run by academic institutions or scientific societies, charge relatively low APCs, in what’s known as the gold model, or nothing at all, known as the diamond model. Science analyzed nearly 20,000 journals listed in a repository of open-access journals between 2019 and 2023, and found that one in four diamond model journals is published in Latin America. Most—83%—are noncommercial, based at universities.
Latin America is also a global pioneer in trying to overcome a long-standing challenge for noncommercial journals in the Global South: invisibility. Most are published in languages other than English, the lingua franca of science, and only a small fraction of them are indexed in international citation and index systems. “I know that my papers will probably not be read on the same scale as if I published in a high-impact journal,” says Oliveira, whose first published paper appeared in Nature. That lack of visibility adds to the inequities facing scientists in the Global South who seek alternatives to commercial publishers, with their high fees or subscription paywalls.
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