The End of a Centralized Open Access Project and the Beginning of a Community-Based Sustainable Infrastructure for Latin America

Abstract

The Latin American region has an ecosystem where the nature of publication is conceived as the act of making public, of sharing, not as the publishing industry. International, national and institutional contexts have led to redefine a project—Redalyc.org—that began in 2003 and that has already fulfilled its original mission: give visibility to knowledge coming from Latin America and promote qualitative scientific journals. Nevertheless, it has to be transformed from a Latin American platform based in Mexico into a community-based regional infrastructure that continues assessing journals’ quality and providing access to full-text, thus allowing visibility for journals and free access to knowledge. It is a framework that generates technology in favor of the empowerment and professionalization of journal editors, making sustainable the editorial task in open access so that Redalyc may sustain itself collectively. This work describes Redalyc’s first model, presents the problematic in process and the new business model Redalyc is designing and adopting to operate.