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.
The interview begins …
RP: Can you say something
about yourself, your institution and your research interests/specialism?
AB-G: I
am a professor-researcher and computer engineer in the Science Communication
and Dissemination Research Group of the School of Political and Social Sciences
at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico (UAEM).
I hold a master’s degree and a
PhD in computer sciences and my research interests are semantic technologies,
information retrieval, artificial intelligence, technologies for science
communication and open access, and data visualisation.
UAEM is a Mexican public
university and a leading and pioneering institution with regard to open access.
It is the primary funder of Redalyc and I am part of Redalyc’s founding team and
currently its Executive Director.
RP: You are also Chair
of AmeliCA. Can you say something about both Redalyc and AmeliCA?
AB-G: Redalyc
is an open-access scholarly project, founded and ran by Eduardo Aguado (General Director) and me. Redalyc has developed
technology to strengthen and provide visibility to journals in the region.
Currently, there are 1,305 journals and upwards of 650,000 full-text articles
available on the platform from which more than 100 million texts are downloaded
per year.
Redalyc provides an indexing
system. To be accepted for inclusion in the index, journals first have to go
through a rigorous quality evaluation process. We also offer services to
complement what journals provide on their own websites – e.g. tools to enable
journals to generate XML that is compliant with ANSI/NISO JATS standards and to
provide PDF, HTML and ePUB reading formats, as well as an article interactive
reader for reading articles on desktop computers as well as on mobile devices.
We also provide
interoperability and search engine optimisation services to enable the journals
to be transparently integrated with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Google Scholar and
hundreds of content aggregators and libraries all around the world. The
metadata are exported automatically to help maximize the visibility and impact
of the content.
In addition, Redalyc has
developed a set of metrics for regional scholarly publications, institutions
and countries to indicate levels of collaboration, internationalisation and
usage of scholarly content.
AmeliCA is a project launched
by Redalyc with the support of CLACSO and UNESCO that aims to create a communication system
– not an indexing system like Redalyc – for the more than 15,000 current
journals from the region.
So, we offer the technology
developed by Redalyc as part of a cooperative strategy in which dozens of
institutions with various decentralised and coordinated projects at different
universities and research groups from the region are able to participate. We
all share the same goal: a collaborative, non-commercial, sustainable and
non-subordinated open access system.
In control of the academy
RP: Should I conclude from
what you say that AmeliCA does not believe commercial publishers ought to play
a role in scholarly communication? If it does see a role for them, what role
should that be?
AB-G: It
seems to me that the way in which the question is posed suggests that the only
alternative model to the one AmeliCA proposes is one that involves commercial
publishers. From where I stand the situation is more complex, and even more
complex when we observe the different regional contexts.
We know that before the Second
World War the participation of commercial publishers was limited, and journals
depended mostly on professional associations. In the late decades of the last
century, however, and even in this one, we have seen an excessive concentration
of scholarly publishing in a few publishing houses – the
oligopoly.
Beyond the damage these
publishers cause to the system of scholarly communication by their monopolistic
activities (which is no small thing) we now face a situation where we are
having to rely on a legitimation system based on metrics provided by two
databases (Web
of Science and Scopus) that belong to
private enterprises and whose entire focus is on making a commercial return.
These companies’ interests lie in making governments and institutions believe
(through their various “advisory groups”) that only research that is indexed by
them is of sufficient quality to be worthy of being supported with resources.
This is the system of evaluation used today for researchers, for projects and
for journals.
And this is a system from
which Latin American scientific publications are largely excluded, especially
those from the Social Sciences and Humanities. Consequently, researchers are
forced to publish in journals owned by commercial publishers who are mainly
based outside the region, and in order to make their work open access they now
have to pay an APC.
The goal of AmeliCA is to
support and consolidate a native model that has operated in Latin America for
more than 30 years, a model in which the publishing process is financed in a
structured and rooted manner with public resources provided via local
universities. This is the starting point and our aim is to demonstrate that
different models of scholarly publishing have developed than one controlled by
commercial publishers.
What has also been happening
in our region recently is that journals that have been locally founded and
developed – with public resources – and then internationalised, are being
acquired by commercial publishers; there are several examples where the
publisher is not an academic publisher anymore. These are journals that were
created and consolidated with public resources, and then supported by Redalyc
for years in order to attain international visibility.
Our view is that this kind of
appropriation, and the considerable restrictions researchers now face in order
to share, process and publish their work open access, among many other
characteristics of the models used by big commercial publishers, are
unacceptable for the development of science.
The commercial strategies that
for-profit publishers have adopted for open access are ravenous, exclusionary
and unsustainable. This is entirely contrary to the vision of open access that
AmeliCA supports.
I believe that developing a
scholarly communication system that is in control of the academy is a much
healthier strategy for science and society.
Why is it that commercial
publishers are a pivotal actor in science communication – in many parts of the
world – if most of the activities needed to generate knowledge are undertaken
by the academy?
Why did commercial publishers
shift from being the providers of publishing services to the owners of content,
and now owners of the tools needed in all stages of the scientific
communication process?
Which of these various roles
is truly beneficial to science?
Free from paywalls
RP: In January, AmeliCA
published a video directly
contrasting the approach being taken by the new European OA initiative Plan S with
what AmeliCA aims to achieve. The video argues that some of Plan S’s goals are
“counterposed” with those of AmeliCA. For instance, it says, where Plan S
simply aims to regulate commercial agreements, AmeliCA is focused on “building
an infrastructure from and for the academy.” Can you say something more about
how AmeliCA aims to achieve this and why it is concerned about Plan S?
AB-G: AmeliCA’s
goal is that all knowledge should be free from paywalls and in that respect,
its view coincides with Plan S, and with the “BBB definition” of open
access. It also agrees with Plan S that authors should retain the copyright in
their works.
Where we would diverge is if
Plan S seeks to replace the pay-for-reading model of subscription publishing
with a pay-for-publishing one, and to do so in a way that leaves publishing in
the control of commercial publishers (as discussed in the previous question).
Currently, it seems likely that Plan S will lead to the near-universal use of
APCs.
The Latin American model
demonstrates that this need not be the outcome. For this reason, we are
convinced that the strategies of Plan S, and of those countries with the
economic power to change the current situation, should be focused on supporting
a system in which open access journals are controlled by the academy – and
without the payment of APCs. They should also be investing in the infrastructure
and technology needed for science communication to be in the hands of
academic institutions. This investment should aim to return resources to the
institutions that generate knowledge.
So, AmeliCA seeks the same
goal as Plan S but wants to achieve it by means of cooperation between multiple
academic institutions. In other words, a strategy that emerges from the academy
itself, not one devised by financiers or governments. And it should be one in
which there are tangible developments in favour of open access – e.g.
platforms, scholarly journals, repositories, technical infrastructure, books,
groups of people such as editorial teams, policies, mandates, and so on, all
working together, joining forces and sharing in order to build a sustainable
model.
A clear example of this can be
seen at the National University of La Plata in Argentina. There you can see
a very strong, determined, and prepared group already using AmeliCA’s
technology to sustain its journals and prevent the implementation of APCs, or
the intervention of commercial publishers.
This group is composed of
researchers and students and they are being trained in publishing matters in
order to sustain the work in the future. Everything is financed with resources
from the university and supported by the infrastructure and technology that
AmeliCA offers and that Redalyc developed over many years.
RP: AmeliCA is focused
primarily on Latin America. More recently, UNESCO announced the launch of the
Global Alliance of Open Access Scholarly Communication Platforms (GLOALL).
This brings together the coordinators of six platforms: AmeliCA, AJOL, Érudit, J-STAGE, OpenEdition, and SciELO,
with the aim “to democratize scientific knowledge following a multicultural,
multi-thematic and multi-lingual approach”. Aside from the geographical spread
of the participants, and the emphasis on language diversity of GLOALL, what
distinguishes its aims from those of AmeliCA and Plan S? Is GLOALL more
about articulating an
alternative vision to Plan S or are there real-life practical initiatives planned?
If so, what kind of initiatives?
AB-G: GLOALL,
in my view, offers the potential for great platforms to work together to create
a non-commercial open access future. This need not explicitly oppose commercial
publishers but could work from another point of view, one that conceives
knowledge as a public common good.
But I should stress that this
is my personal view. GLOALL is a new initiative and the scope has yet to be
defined. We know that we share common goals and that these need to be realised
in the form of policies, projects and strategies, and to be focused on
achieving open access aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals established
in the United Nations 2030 Agenda.
AmeliCA will willingly share
its technology and experience with GLOALL members, and with any region that
wishes to strengthen the model we believe in.
São Paulo Statement
RP: Three weeks after the
launch of GLOALL, AmeliCA and the African Open Science Platform joined
with cOAlition S (the group of funders behind Plan S) and OA2020 (a European
initiative with the same goals as Plan S) to sign the São Paulo Statement on Open Access. This was done at
the annual meeting of the Global Research Council (GRC). Can you say how this statement came about (i.e. who
approached whom?) and how the statement fits with the goals of AmeliCA and
GLOALL? How difficult was it to arrive at wording that all sides could agree
on? What are the next steps if any?
AB-G: The
question is wrongly posed: AmeliCA didn’t join with either cOAlition S or with
OA2020. AmeliCA was invited by Science Europe to
participate in an event. Several other platforms were invited and together we
signed a statement reaffirming the common goal we all share of freeing
knowledge from paywalls. This is the goal of dozens and hundreds of platforms.
The São Paulo Statement does no more than state that.
Our concern is not over the
goals of Plan S but how they are implemented. The purpose of the meeting we had
with the Plan S architects was to discuss that. And at that meeting, I
explained our stance (as discussed in the previous questions). I also presented
our stance publicly in a panel held at the GRC event.
Aside from stating that we reject
the APC model, I mentioned in that meeting the risk of disrupting the Latin
American system by implementing a Eurocentric model, and I resolutely asked why
institutions and governments in Latin America would be motivated to continue
subsidising scholarly publishing if strategies are put in place that will end
up driving more public money to commercial enterprises.
I pointed out that Latin
America currently publishes between 13% and 20% of the articles produced by
European researchers. And I asked:
We have repeatedly expressed
our concerns about Plan S. Now we are waiting for cOAlition S to announce its
final implementation plans. We hope that the feedback phase has been useful,
and that cOAlition S will adjust their strategy to enable an inclusive,
participative open access model to be developed, one in which non-profit
scholarly communication is taken into account when financial resources are
distributed.
If they don’t, Plan S will
only further weaken those publishing activities that are still in the control
of the academy, and strengthen commercial publishers – to the point perhaps
where the former will disappear altogether.
AmeliCA’s goals are crystal
clear: we want scholarly publishing to be in the hands of the academy –
universities and professional associations. In other words, to continue working
in the way that Redalyc has been working for decades.
RP: The wording of the São
Paulo Statement is very general and does not specify much in the way of
practical action. As you will know, cOAlition S has been struggling to get
global buy-in for Plan S, and has attracted criticism in the Global South for
attempting to foist a one-size-fits-all Eurocentric model (as you call it) of
scholarly publishing on the world. I assume therefore that cOAlition S would
see real PR benefit in getting the São Paulo Statement agreed, if only as a way
of suggesting that there is no fundamental conflict of interest between Plan S
and research communities in the Global South. From what you say, I assume you
do still see conflicts of interest. Either way, from the perspective of AmeliCA
what was the logic of signing the statement? What benefits do you think signing
it might bring to the Global South?
AB-G: Scholarly
publishing is a global ecosystem that already exists. Consequently, for a
proposal to be established as global, and for everyone’s benefit, all countries
and institutions need to participate in the discussion.
I would highlight several
points about which I believe there is agreement in the South, although with
some nuances: the present model is unsustainable, and knowledge must be freed
from paywalls. Every stakeholder agrees with this other than those who benefit
from the way things currently are. The only point of disagreement, as I said,
is over how open access is achieved.
In the South, Redalyc,
AmeliCA, CLACSO, Latindex, and LaReferencia (amongst
others) have expressed their strong objection to the APC model. And I expressed this clearly and
vehemently at São Paolo, so I hope that the final implementation guidelines
will demonstrate that cOAlition S has listened to the feedback it has received
and is prepared to provide resources for non-profit players. Here I am thinking
of non-APC journals, academic open access platforms, technologies to support
scholarly publishing, repositories and other scholarly communication tools. If
this happens then our engaging with cOAlition S will have led to something
positive.
And if Plan S ends up
dismantling the current harmful system for evaluating research and researchers
based on the false prestige bestowed on publications by the Impact Factor – as
called for by the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) – there is no doubt that the South would benefit.
As to any PR benefits the São
Paulo Statement may have: I wouldn’t like to think the meeting was only
undertaken for media purposes. In signing the statement, we wanted to give a
vote of confidence to the notion that communication and feedback between the
North and South is a good thing. Plan S and the general public know AmeliCA’s
principles and values. We unwaveringly affirm them and will keep working
towards them.
RP: I believe AmeliCA plans to
publish a public response to the São Paulo Statement. What will be the aim and
purpose of that public response and when do you expect to publish it?
AB-G: We
signed the declaration and we shared it. However, I would stress that several
platforms signed it, some of which AmeliCA and Redalyc distance themselves from
completely. It would be wrong, or mere innocence, to believe that we have
changed our mind about our goals and objectives.
Together with other
institutions AmeliCA and Redalyc are working towards, and hope to further,
non-commercial open access (as I have explained) and we resolutely support
DORA.
So, 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. I would, however,
note that SciELO – another regional initiative in Latin America – has
signed an agreement with Clarivate Analytics. In
doing so they have chosen a different route, one that legitimises the Impact
Factor as a way of ranking the importance of journals. They have also
chosen ScholarOne (which
is a proprietary Clarivate Analytics product) as their publishing platform in
Brazil, rather than the open source software Open Journal Systems (OJS) developed by Public Knowledge Project (PKP). And they are encouraging the publishing of journals in
English over local languages.
This interview allows us to
take a deeper look at the complexities of these issues, which we’ll also share
in a publication on the AmeliCA web site and via other means and forums in the
coming days.
Plan S may sign general
declarations with dozens or hundreds of actors, but it is clear that the real
detail and discussion must be found in the “small print” – that is, in the
implementation guidelines. We are all waiting for news from Plan S about that.
Let’s see how they’ve enriched their understanding and stance after the
multiple conversations they have had.
Terribly alarming
RP: I sometimes think that OA
advocates in the global North have spent 17-odd years working towards a
solution that (as AmeliCA puts it) “simply aims to regulate commercial agreements”
and are now realising that this approach is creating a system no more financially sustainable than the subscription system. Would you agree? If so,
how can this be resolved at this point in time? Might it be too late?
AB-G: If
the focus of any new initiative is on replacing the model of paying-to-read
with one based on paying-to-publish, it will inevitably create an
unsustainable and non-inclusive system.
What is clear is that at this
point in time the control of scholarly publishing is in the hands of commercial
publishers, and so any planned change must necessarily include them. However,
in the process of change control needs to be transferred to academia – to academic
institutions, to universities, to academic associations, and to other
stakeholders whose focus is on the development of science rather than promoting
private commercial interests. And if this is done in a collective manner and in
a distributed and fair way the value and power of scholarly communication can
be maintained and enhanced.
This means building
infrastructure, taking advantage of the great benefits that communication and
information technologies now offer, professionalising institutions so that they
can create a publishing tradition, and anything else that can further the task
of taking back control of scholarly communication which is currently dominated
by private interests.
As things stand, the South
cannot escape the perversion of the system. It saddens us to see how more and
more national systems of journal assessment disqualify local journals if they
don’t rank in the first quartiles of Scopus or Web of Science, no matter how
much they have contributed to the history and problem solving of the discipline
or region concerned.
As a consequence, local
journals are now receiving fewer direct resources. And they are receiving fewer
contributions because researchers are discouraged from publishing in them.
Researchers are discouraged because local journals do not fulfil the
requirements needed to be considered “mainstream”, and researchers’ salaries
and incentives depend on being published in mainstream journals.
This has happened in Colombia,
in Mexico and in many other countries. The agreements between SciELO and
Clarivate Analytics, the appropriation of journals by commercial publishers,
the hiring of SpringerOpen by public universities to dictate how and where to
publish, the list of such examples is vast. Right now, we are looking at an ecosystem
at risk of total collapse. And that is terribly alarming.
Million-dollar question
RP: Is it in your view
possible to build a global system of scholarly communication (and an open-access infrastructure) able to meet the needs of all countries in a fair and equitable way, both countries in the Global South and those in the Global North? If so, what might it look like?
AB-G: That is the million-dollar question. Thank you for asking, and for thinking that I could provide even the draft of an answer. Undoubtedly,
that is what we all want, and because of that we gather together and debate the
issue. But let me share my viewpoint on that with you.
We need to start by asking: what science communication model or
paradigm can be considered a suitable one for humanity?
This is not necessarily a matter of South or North. We must go
back to basics and recover the essence of what science communication is and
should be. Is it to communicate research, and to do so to the limit of what is
possible in order to attain the greatest efficacy and efficiency in putting
scientific and technological advances at society’s disposal?
We must remind ourselves that the goal of publishing is to make
our research available for the public, to submit findings to public scrutiny,
and to do so in a way that allows everyone to access knowledge without
restriction.
We need to facilitate a global conversation that focuses on both
the large and small problems humanity faces and to ensure that all researchers
are able to participate in that conversation, not only those who can pay to
take part in it.
Current information technologies enable us to rethink what is now
taken for granted. We can deconstruct what we know does not work and we can
decide what engine is needed to further the agendas and work of researchers.
And we can be more creative in planning how to distribute resources.
While many efforts have been made to do this around the world,
there hasn’t yet been enough determination and resources put into uniting these
isolated and disparate efforts. Open access and scholarly communication find
themselves at a key historical moment and we are now in a position, and have a
great opportunity, to redraw the system of scholarly communication.
I imagine a web of data for science, a knowledge cloud – sustainable
and open – that promotes a participatory and inclusive science communication
system, one in which every institution that is generating knowledge is able to
connect it into a giant graph of knowledge.
In order to do that I strongly believe that academic institutions
must not only be the generators – as it were – of this asset, but also the
owners and transmitters of it.
RP: Thank you very much for answering my questions. I look forward
to seeing how the various initiatives you are involved in develop going
forward.
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