Reassembling Scholarly Communications Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access

The Open Access Movement proposes to remove price and permission barriers for accessing peer-reviewed research work—to use the power of the internet to duplicate material at an infinitesimal cost-per-copy. In this volume, contributors show that open access does not exist in a technological or policy vacuum; there are complex social, political, cultural, philosophical, and economic implications for opening research through digital technologies. The contributors examine open access from the perspectives of colonial legacies, knowledge frameworks, publics and politics, archives and digital preservation, infrastructures and platforms, and global communities. he contributors consider such topics as the perpetuation of colonial-era inequalities in research production and promulgation; the historical evolution of peer review; the problematic histories and discriminatory politics that shape our choices of what materials to preserve; the idea of scholarship as data; and resistance to the commercialization of platforms. Case studies report on such initiatives as the Making and Knowing Project, which created an openly accessible critical digital edition of a sixteenth-century French manuscript, the role of formats in Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), a network of more than 1,200 journals from sixteen countries. Taken together, the contributions represent a substantive critical engagement with the politics, practices, infrastructures, and imaginaries of open access, suggesting alternative trajectories, values, and possible futures.

Scholarly communication is perhaps the phase in the research life cycle that has most seized the opportunity to broaden inclusion through the use of information technologies. Open access has promoted free and unrestricted access to scientific content, especially, driven by mandates, when it has been publicly funded. OA holds out the promise of a global scientific dialogue that would allow for a more inclusive, global research ecosystem.
Globalization has indeed become the ultimate goal in scientific practice, in which the circulation of knowledge generated in all regions is expected to have worldwide visibility. Often, this goal of global visibility has been equated with journals' presences in "mainstream" databases such as Web of Science (WoS) or Scopus. Those outside the Global North are encouraged to publish in journals indexed by these databases if their contributions are to have international visibility (although this is not guaranteed), but also so that these publications are viewed as high quality. 1 Latin America, as with many other developing regions, has historically faced a lack of visibility and recognition for the science that it generates. This is mainly due to the scarce presence of Latin American journals in the aforementioned mainstream databases, which has led to the marginalization of research produced in the region. This paradigm of valuation and communication presents a conundrum for the regional context. That is: there is low representation of Latin American research output in the legitimated knowledge circulation channels for the Global North, even though this region is possessed of an extremely robust ecosystem of science communication-and a system that is natively open and scholar-owned at that. Indeed, Latin American scholarly journals are led, owned, and financed by academic institutions. As covered in other chapters in this volume, each academic institution is part of an informal cooperative system that is neither formalized nor made explicit. Each institution supports journals that are managed by their own faculty members and the content of these journals is available to everyone. Where an institution is publicly funded, public budgets from local or national governments are used to support these publications. In this way, each institution's investment in journals mutually benefits all other institutions. This kind of asymmetries generated by the primary communication, collaboration, and dissemination channels in the Global North. As noted by Marin, Petralia and Stubrin, and Banerjee, Babini, and Aguado, OA is viewed as the best option to promote a democratic and inclusive development and has proven results in increasing the international visibility of research. 3 Yet, this has been shown to be an overly optimistic stance. For although, as highlighted by Babini, open access is the standard in Latin America, this openness has not broken the inertial dependencies of traditional legitimation circuits. 4 Thus, the exclusion, asymmetry, and gaps remain.
Further, this regional OA landscape is threatened by commercial openaccess strategies from the Global North, which put at risk of rupture the Latin American OA nonprofit ecosystem while proposing to move to a new circumstance of exclusion: from "paying to read" to "paying to publish" (the APC-based OA model).
Hence, openness is not enough. It remains imperative also to modify systems of research assessment and to find more effective methods of communicating the knowledge generated in different regions, disciplinary fields, and languages. As Beigel suggests, it is not about giving the voices from the South a space in the channels where the North is established, but to question the very foundations of supposedly "universal" academic recognition and find ways to implement a non-hegemonic transnational dialogue. 5 There are multiple approaches to achieving this. One strategy in Latin America is gambling upon reaching visibility within existing legitimized channels by adopting questionable research assessment practices, such as the use of the impact factor. This is the approach adopted by the SciELO Citation Index. Conversely, others such as Redalyc and CLACSO seek to integrate the region's developments, experience, and the academic model in order to minimize costs and join forces to guarantee the sustainability of OA and to maintain the academic-owned nature of dissemination and production of knowledge. This is being done through a recently launched, initiative called AmeliCA (Open Knowledge for Latin America and the Global South), which is supported by UNESCO and dozens of universities throughout the region. 6

Technology for Visibility, Discoverability, and Internationalization
Some of the questions that arise when trying to build a more neutral, equitable, and inclusive space for scholarly communications include: are  While the implementation of XML in journals carries great potential, there is a deeper and more relational level of granularity at which information could be disseminated. Every piece of information that comprises a text from a journal article or from any other scholarly content could be understood, interpreted, and linked into a "knowledge cloud." There are many barriers to such a global system, though. As noted by Ora Lassila, although everything on the web is machine-readable, it is not machine-comprehensible. 9 For instance, the information content of scholarly outputs could be represented as connections of informational elements where the structure, formed by nodes and connections, expresses knowledge. That form of structuration, though, goes far beyond the capabilities of XML, whose data model is a tree. Indeed, we would argue that a far better data model for knowledge representation is a graph, as provided by RDF (a resource description framework).
Thus, we argue, a transition needs to be made from a machine-readable to machine-comprehensible paradigm with respect to scholarly information resources: a transition from XML to RDF.

Dialogue
The "HowOpenIsIt?®" Open Access Spectrum guide provides a scale for machine readability of OA content that includes, as a maximum level of openness, a notion of semantics that has not yet been achieved by Latin American journals. 10 RDF, the technology that would enable this, is an abstract model, a way to break down knowledge into discrete pieces. 11 And, indeed, there are two different purposes behind XML and RDF that should Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/677150/9780262363723_c002000.pdf by guest on 29 July 2022 Toward Linked Open Data for Latin America 291 be understood for a future semantic scholarly context. This boils down to the use cases: for those who wish to query documents (XML) and those who wish to extract the "meaning" in some form and query that (RDF). 12 Minimal structuring and semantics are integral to the web as it currently exists, in the form of hypertext. The essential feature of hypertext is the nonlinearity of content production by the authors and of content perception and navigation by users. 13 Indeed, from even minimal semantics have arisen amazing results. What, though, if web pages had more semantics? 14 Semantics, the process of communicating enough meaning to result in an action, has great potential to enable scholarly resources to join the so-called Web of Data. 15 Semantic technologies discover relationships that exist among resources and then represent those relationships via some form of metadata, making it easier to develop reusable techniques for querying, exploring, and using the underlying data. 16 Using this semantic web, software can process content, reason with it, combine it, and perform deductions logically to solve problems automatically.
We, the authors of this chapter, have previously applied semantic technologies to structured scholarly resources. The results consist of a semantic model for selective knowledge discovery dubbed "OntoOAI" a semantic application that enables the processing of data structured with OAI-PMH, the application of ontologies in the description and verification of the knowledge obtained from OAI-PMH resources, and inference-testing mechanisms on the resultant dataset. 17 OntoOAI was executed using a combination of three sources of information: Redalyc, the institutional repository of Roskilde University (RUDAR), and DBpedia. This data integration was possible through two ontologies: Dublin Core and Friend of a Friend (FOAF). OntoOAI processed 395,940 items resulting in 7.9 million triplets, which correspond to granular pieces (for instance, 60,354 triplets of author names; 1.6 million triplets of topics; 394,775 triplets of dates, and more).
It should be noted that given the identified associations between resources, it is possible to take advantage of graphs, hierarchical, or other net visualizations that allow users to explore and browse information following relations at different levels, which adds value for discoverability purposes.
OntoOAI's application verified the feasibility and benefits of using semantic technologies to achieve selective knowledge discovery while also 292 Arianna Becerril-García and Eduardo Aguado-López showing some of the limitations of using OAI-PMH data for this purpose (among which is the lack of both URIs and full-text structuration). The latter would enable a journal article (or another scholarly resource) to be broken down into pieces that individually would form nodes in a graph whose relations among them are represented as edges and together they might be expressed in an ontology. RDF based on JATS could also work to achieve that task (see figure 20.3). Indeed, if this lack of URIs and RDF availability are overcome by Latin American scholarly resources, all this information could be part of the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud. 18 This would mean that every piece of information published by scholarly journals in Latin