In August I had the opportunity to present at the Fourth International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference, held in Mexico City on the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) campus. The conference was attended by editors, publishers, librarians, researchers, developers, and content aggregators from around the world, with strong participation from Latin America. It was an exciting event and also marked the launch of the ORCID user interface in Spanish, French, and Chinese.
In his opening keynote, PKP Director John Willinsky cited ORCID as an important emerging technology with opportunities to help shape and improve the open access (OA) publishing landscape worldwide. The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a collaborative, university-led effort and today nearly 5,000 OA journals are published worldwide using PKP’s Open Journal Systems (OJS) open source publishing product.
Most of the research published in Latin America is published open access, and these publications have traditionally been in Spanish and Portuguese, although there is a strong trend now toward parallel publication in English, particularly in STEM fields. Resources including SciELO, Latindex, and Redalyc support the archival, discovery, and impact evaluation of Ibero-American research and scholarship for both regional and international audiences. Between them SciELO and Redalyc now index nearly 2,000 peer-reviewed, full-text, OA journals. Latindex provides direct access to a growing collection of more than 4,000 Ibero-American online journals offering full text articles. These indexes are very important for the discovery of Latin American research, as there is little overlap with Scopus and ISI, with only 3.6% of the publications in Scopus from Latin America. PKP, SciELO, Redalyc, Latindex, and others are currently working together, with support from IDRC, UNESCO, and INASP, to improve accessibility to indicators from these OA portals and to provide analysis tools to complement the traditional indicators from ISI and Scopus.
ORCID iDs are a huge benefit to those researchers with complex names, mulitple surnames, and whose names incorporate Spanish and Portuguese characters. Together with integration into publication and repository workflows, ORCID iDs will support improved discoverability for Latin American research. ORCID Ambassadors in Latin America are helping to spread the word. Brazilian researcher Antonio A.R. Neves authored a recent blog post about why he supports ORCID, and Redalyc IT director Arianna Becerril Garcia is incorporating ORCID information into training courses available to the publishers and editors of Latin American journals indexed in Redalyc. I look forward to working with the Latin American research community and welcome your comments.
