In addition, Becerril-García
is the Chair of a new project called AmeliCA (Open Knowledge for Latin America and the Global
South). AmeliCA’s goal is to propagate the Redalyc model to the more than
15,000 journals in the region and elsewhere in the Global South.
As Chair of AmeliCA,
Becerril-García has become a vocal critic of Plan S –
the European OA initiative announced last year by a group of funders that call
themselves cOAlition S. While AmeliCA shares cOAlition S’s goal of achieving
universal open access, says Becerril-García, it fears that, as currently
conceived, Plan S would disadvantage researchers in the Global South and
exclude them further from the international scholarly publishing system.
Historically, research
institutions in the South have struggled to afford the fees necessary to buy
access to international subscription journals. But a move to an OA system almost exclusively
based on pay-to-publish (which Plan S seems likely to lead to), says
Becerril-García, would see researchers in the South struggling to find the
money to pay the article-processing charges (APCs) needed to publish their work in international journals. One
problem would be replaced by another.
Plan S would also further increase the control that for-profit publishers have over the scholarly communication system, which Becerril-García believes is undesirable.
Plan S would also further increase the control that for-profit publishers have over the scholarly communication system, which Becerril-García believes is undesirable.
What is needed, she says, is to build a “collaborative, non-commercial, sustainable and
non-subordinated” system in which control is removed from commercial publishers
and handed back to the academy.
The role that AmeliCA and
Becerril-García have played in the discussion over Plan S has been important
and influential. Interestingly, as the debate has played out, it is not only OA
advocates in the South that have been reaching the conclusion that AmeliCA has.
Heeded and acted upon?
We will have to wait and see
exactly how influential AmeliCA has been. Following a consultation process,
cOAlition S is due shortly to publish an updated set of implementation
guidelines for Plan S. For her part, Becerril-García hopes that the feedback that she and
others have provided has been heeded and will be acted upon.
Amongst other things,
Becerril-García believes that cOAlition S should commit some of its funding to help
build the infrastructure and technology needed to allow the academy to regain control of science communication. So, for instance, she would like to see the funders provide money for “non-APC journals, academic open access
platforms, technologies to support scholarly publishing, repositories and other
scholarly communication tools.”
To support her argument,
Becerril-García points out that Latin America currently publishes between 13%
and 20% of the articles produced by European researchers. “If Plan S intends to
pay APCs to for-profit journals then why are the costs of publishing European papers in Latin America not worthy of being funded by Plan S too?”, she asks.
The rumour
on Twitter is that the new Plan S guidelines
will be “less controversial” than initially proposed. Whether there will be
sufficient changes to satisfy Becerril-García’s aspirations, or the needs of
the Global South, remains to be seen. While cOAlition S has made sympathetic
noises about helping the Global South, we must wonder if European funders will
really prove willing to subsidise open platforms and OA journals in the Global
South, or to create much in the way of a new scholarly infrastructure – not
least because they have set themselves an extremely tight timetable to achieve
100% open access (2020).
And are they really committed
to wresting back control from for-profit publishers?
What is surely also important,
however, is that AmeliCA has independently set itself the goal of propagating
the APC-free OA model that Redalyc has been developing since 2003. Amongst other things,
this saw it partner recently with UNESCO and a group of other national and
regional open access platforms to launch the Global Alliance of Open Access
Scholarly Communication Platforms (GLOALL). The aim is to “democratise scientific knowledge
following a multicultural, multi-thematic and multi-lingual approach”.
Interestingly, just weeks
after the launch of GLOALL, AmeliCA joined with the Plan S funders to sign the São
Paulo Statement on open access. Becerril-García
stresses, however, that “our signature on the São Paulo Statement must be
understood as a commitment to an agreement between diverse platforms that all
have open access as a common goal”. She adds, “It would be wrong, or mere
innocence, to believe that we have changed our mind about our goals and
objectives.”
Whatever one’s views on Plan
S, it has surely played a valuable role in focusing minds on the likely
implications of moving to a pay-to-play publishing regime and the invidious
position that researchers in the Global South find themselves in vis-à-vis the
international scholarly publishing system.
All of which leaves us with
what Becerril-García calls the “million-dollar question”: is it possible to
build a global system of scholarly communication able to meet the needs of
everyone, and on a fair and equitable basis? My suspicion is that this is unlikely to prove possible for so long
as the Global North remains so deeply wedded to the principles of neoliberalism.
To get a fuller view of
AmeliCA’s hopes and ambitions please read the answers Becerril-García gives
below to a number of questions I emailed her.
