Redalyc
Background: Redalyc (Sistema de Información Científica), launched in 2002 at the public Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, is a scientific information network that serves as an index of more than 1,800 open access journals from 800-plus institutions in 36 countries.
Mission: Redalyc provides a non-commercial infrastructure to advance Diamond Open Access, based on the paradigm of science as a public good. Redalyc is focused on keeping control of publishing within the academic community to ensure a sustainable scientific ecosystem that includes the voices of all who want to participate.
The Cost of Knowledge
“The cost of knowledge is not the cost of publishing it. The direct cost of producing research is the funding for the project itself: The personnel, the laboratories, and the paid hours for the principal investigator and their team. The indirect cost is even greater and is rarely accounted for: The training of the researcher, and maintenance, over years, of laboratories, accumulated expertise, equipment, and colleagues, all before a single publishable result exists.
“That cost —both direct and indirect, largely funded by public money —is fully paid before the article ever reaches a journal’s doorstep. What follows — subscriptions, article processing charges, transformative agreements — is not the cost of knowledge; it is the toll charged afterward for access to something society has already built and paid for.”
“The cost of knowledge takes a form that is rarely discussed: Maintenance. For the equivalent of 60 Nature article processing charges, RadalycUAMéx1 sustains, for a full year, its platform, its team, and a collection spanning over two decades of Latin American open-access content made available to the world. Sixty articles, one after another, cover the cost to the region of maintaining something the rest of the world is only just beginning to realize it is missing. “
“The true cost, however, lies neither in the salary nor in the server —both exist, both are paid for, and both rank last on the list. It lies in public policy: An evaluation system that rewards publishing in high impact-factor journals, a science council that funds article processing charges for its researchers at a foreign publishing house, and a university that signs a transformative agreement using its own library budget.”
“Each of those decisions, made in full compliance with the law and in the name of excellence and internalization, channels public funds into commercial avenues.” In return, the regional infrastructure —the existing infrastructure that never charged for publishing—receives rhetorical recognition and a mere pittance from the budget.”
“The academic community itself, universities, science and technology councils, governments, and funders —have failed to finance their own objective: They never built the infrastructure, governance, or sufficient capital of their own to actually own the library they claimed to be constructing. They failed to build the common good of knowledge.”
“It is not a matter of cost or accounting; the issue concerns the polis, control, and ownership. The call to action is to place the community above commercialization: That is the guiding vision. There is only one path: The radical reappropriation of control and ownership of knowledge by the community.”
For the full paper, go to: https://www.redalyc.org/redalyc/acerca-de/el-costo-del-conocimiento.html or https://zenodo.org/communities/redalyc/records?q=&l=list&p=1&s=10&sort=newest.
-Eduardo Aguado-López, Founder and Director of Research, Redalyc