New publishing models for scholarly communication and the Brazilian open access policy

Abstract

High prices of journal subscriptions, which have triggered the exhaustively discussed crisis of scholarly journals, made information access very limited. Within this context, information access has been a great challenge to developing countries such as Brazil. Although such crisis had started in the middle 80’s, there is not a definitive solution hitherto. Nevertheless, new information and communication technologies have provided emerging alternatives for the scholarly communication. One that deserves mention is concerned with the standards established by the Open Archives Initiative, which defines a model of interoperability for digital collections, including electronic journals, institutional repositories and digital libraries, amongst others. Within this context, this paper aims to provide a picture of the Brazilian initiatives with open access journals and conferences over the last four years using both PkP OJS and OCS as their platform, respectively. Based on the study of the scholarly communication process and the impacts brought about by the use of information technologies, the paper focuses on the adoption of a national information policy concerned with the open access movement and implemented by the Brazilian Institute of Information on Science and Technology (Ibict afterwards). In this sense, the work reported comprises the assessment of a number of initiatives with OJS (141 journals created and maintained so far) and a few others with OCS (around six conferences or so). Moreover, it points out the achievements of a technology transfer programme implemented by Ibict in order to have the academic community involved with open access publishing models, methodologies and tools. Besides this national approach, the paper slightly comments on alemplus, an acronym that stands for “open access in Portuguese speaking countries”, a programme that aims to join efforts within this whole community and to expand the Brazilian and Portuguese initiatives already implemented.