User:Filippo Morsiani/Open access in Guatemala

Together with other countries of the region, Guatemala participates in open access regional subject repositories, today with a growing number of full-texts, examples: agriculture (SIDALC), education (Relpe and CEDUCAR), public management and policies (CLAD-SIARE), social sciences (FLACSO, Enlace Académico Centroamericano and CLACSO), work (LABORDOC), information science (E-Lis), among others.

A few scientific and academic journals from Guatemala are available full-text in DOAJ. As of 2015, there are 3 OA journals published in Guatemala that are indexed in DOAJ: (i) Revista Internacional de Psicologia; (ii) Eleutheria and (iii) Laissez-Faire. The country also has a Latindex focal point hosted by the University of San Carlos. In the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources (ROAD), eight other OA journals are listed: (i) Revista de la Universidad del Valle de Guatemala; (ii) Revista de medicina interna de Guatemala; (iii) Revista Estudios Digital; (iv) Eco; (v) Revista Guatemalteca de Cardiologia; (vi) revista Guatemalteca de Cirugia; (vii) Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades and (viii) Ciencia, technologia y Salud.

Open access licences are promoted by Creative Commons Guatemala.

The Advanced Research and Education Network from Guatemala (Red Avanzada Guatemalteca para la Investigación y Educación – RAGIE) is a member of RedCLARA that supports COLABORA, Red Federada de Repositorios and other regional initiatives that promote the creation and cooperation among institutional repositories.

Enlace Académico Centroamericano (Central America Academic Link) is an initiative from FLACSO's Executive Secretariat in Costa Rica, with support from the Ford Foundation, and participation of full-text contents from Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Panamá. This initiative provides social sciences open access publications, news, resources, events and selected links.

Guatemala participates in The Global Network for Science Academies (IAP) project Open Institutional Repositories Infrastructure network for Central America and the Caribbean.

As indicated in international OA Policy registries such as ROARMAP, there exists a need for the establishment of OA policies at the national and institutional levels in order to support the building of university OA repositories. Guatemala participates in the Latin America Community of Digital Libraries and Repositories (COLABORA), but currently has no open access digital repositories registered in ROAR and OpenDOAR.

More advocacy efforts through the organization of workshops and seminars are needed to educate academia of the benefits of open access.

As of 2014, research shows that Guatemala accounts for 0.26% of all OA journals indexed in Latindex. This corresponds to a total of 14 locally published OA journals.

5-8 March 2013: 30 experts and Policy specialists from 25 countries including Belize; Virgin Islands; St Vincent and Grenadines; St Kitts and Nevis and St Martin; Argentina; Brazil; Chile; Costa Rica; Dominican Republic; El Salvador; Guatemala; Uruguay and Mexico gathered in Kingston to develop strategies and a road map to implement open access policies in the Latin American and Caribbean Region. This was the first regional consultation on open access to scientific information and research organized by the UNESCO Kingston Cluster office in collaboration with Ministry of Ministry of Science, Technology, Energy and Mining, Ministry of Information, Government of Jamaica, University of West Indies and UNESCO National Commission for Jamaica. Workshop participants had the opportunity to contribute towards highlighting priority areas for intervention to achieve "Openness" in the region and individual countries. Participants reviewed the UNESCO OA policy templates and worked out specific policies for their own country/institution.

List of publications
2014: "Open Access Indicators and Scholarly Communications in Latin America" is the result of a joint research and development project supported by UNESCO and undertaken by UNESCO in partnership with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP); the Scientific Electronic Library (SciELO);the Network of Scientific Journals of Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal (RedAlyC); African Journals Online (AJOL); the Latin America Social Sciences School- Brazil (FLACSO- Brazil); and the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO).