Diamond, not gold
Non-commercial open access in Latin America, and a lesson Europe learned late
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
In Europe the open access debate has for years been about one thing: who pays the publisher, and how much. In Latin America, since the late 1990s, open access has meant something else. Universities and public institutions publish journals, and neither reader nor author pays. SciELO began operating in Brazil in 1998, Redalyc in Mexico a few years later, and in 2018 AmeliCA set out to turn that experience into a shared, non-commercial infrastructure. What Europe now calls 'diamond open access' has been ordinary practice in the region for decades.
This model is not marginal. The OA Diamond Journals Study, published in 2021 with the support of cOAlition S, estimated the number of such journals worldwide at between seventeen and twenty-nine thousand, most of them small, multilingual and attached to universities and learned societies. The same study showed that these journals survive on tiny budgets and volunteer labour, and count for almost nothing in any system of research assessment.
Europe, by contrast, chose the 'gold' road: an article is free to read, but its author or the author's institution pays to publish it. For a researcher in São Paulo that charge is sometimes several times the monthly stipend of a doctoral student. The result is plain: access opens for the reader and closes for the author. And because our universities' assessment systems still reward publication in indexed journals of the North, public research money in the South flows onto the balance sheets of a few large publishers in the North.
The question of language hides at exactly this point. From the start SciELO published articles in Portuguese, Spanish and English side by side, and made the region's knowledge available in its own languages. The pressure of rankings is now wearing that multilingualism down: journals turn to English to be seen, and lose their local readers. Open access that ignores the reader's language has kept only half of its promise.
UNESCO's Recommendation on Open Science of 2021 stressed linguistic diversity and public infrastructure. The question is why European policymakers, after years of costly agreements with publishers, have only now turned to a model that the Global South built long ago, and why its builders are so seldom named in this late discovery. The lesson of Latin America is simple: public knowledge should be published by public infrastructure, in the languages of the people who read it.
Questions for discussion
- If diamond journals remain invisible to assessment systems, can they hold out against the author-pays model?
- What should European open science policy learn directly from SciELO, Redalyc and AmeliCA?
- How can an article be published in several languages without one becoming the 'original' and the others an afterthought?
References
Bosman, Jeroen, et al. 2021. The OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 1: Findings. Science Europe and cOAlition S.
Packer, Abel L. 2009. 'The SciELO Open Access: A Gold Way from the South.' Canadian Journal of Higher Education 39 (3): 111–126.
UNESCO. 2021. UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. Paris: UNESCO.