MT2 Open South: The Open Science Experience in Latin America and the Caribbean
Course Chairs: Gimena del Rio Riande, PhD, Researcher, Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas y Crítica Textual (IIBICRIT), National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina
Instructor: Gimena del Rio Riande, PhD, Researcher, Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas y Crítica Textual (IIBICRIT), National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina;
Wouter Schallier, Chief, Hernán Santa Cruz Library, UN/ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, United Nations), Santiago, Chile;
April M. Hathcock, Scholarly Communications Librarian, New York University;
Daniel O’Donnell, PhD, Professor of English, University of Lethbridge, Canada
Among the actors in the scientific field that have gained strength in recent decades, Latin America and the Caribbean stand out in a sense that the concept of “commons” is generally accepted all over the region.
In the case of the knowledge commons, Peru, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico have shown real advances in terms of national laws that seek to make scientific knowledge produced with public funds a common good managed by the academic community. We can also highlight regional projects such as Scielo and redalyc.org that have played a unique role in making the scientific production published in Ibero American and Latin American journals available free of charge. Open Access is now established in Latin America and the Caribbean as the most extended communication model in the academic community, giving visibility and value to scientific production at a regional and global level.
Nevertheless, Open Access in Latin America and the Caribbean still faces a few challenges that need to be tackled in order to consolidate the model and to make it fully interoperable with global Open Access models.
The course will analyze these challenges and will highlight initiatives and explore options to advance Open Access in Latin America and the Caribbean. The course will also analyze and debate the aforementioned national laws and specific cases that illustrate the progress and challenges of Open Access in the region, as well as in the global context, and will present a practical approach to deal with the “different open accesses in the world.”
Furthermore, the course will highlight the relevance, challenges and opportunities of Open Research Data for institutions and researchers in Latin America and the Caribbean. Through the results of the LEARN project (
http://www.learn-rdm.eu/), the course will present a set of good practices, examples of institutional policies and practical recommendations from Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Finally, the course will put Open Access to publications and to research data in the context of the larger Open Science movement, which is changing the face of academic research and society in a profound way. This vision of Open Science is creating a global environment where researchers, innovators, companies and citizens can publish, find, use and reuse each other's data, tools, publications and other outputs for research, innovation and educational purposes.
In addition to people interested specifically in the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, this course will be of interest to people working in other regions in both the Global South and the Global North. We will encourage participants to engage reflectively with the material, bringing their own experiences to bear.