AmeliCA

Ameli, open Knowledge for Latin America and the Global South (AmeliCA) is an initiative set up by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Latin American Council of Social Sciences ( CLACSO ), the network of scientific journals of Latin America and the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal (REDALYC), the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico (UAEM), the University of Antioquia (UdeA), the National University of La Plata (UNLP) and the University of Panama (UP). This is a new strategy configuration, in response to the international, regional, national and institutional context, which seeks a collaborative, sustainable, protected and non-commercial open access solution for Latin America and the Global South.

There is a consensus that since the transformations of the 1980s, knowledge, universities and academic publications are diverting their mission of contributing to the improvement of the quality of life and the reduction of social inequality.

Therefore, it is necessary to reconstruct the spaces of visibility, which have become spaces of legitimation and exclusion, to build a communication project of critical thinking that can respond with alternatives to dissemination, construction of networks, exercise of analysis, training, and technology for the scientific publication process. This requires a dialogue space that has as principles and values:

• Preserve the academic nature of the scientific publication.
• Scientific knowledge, especially the one generated by public funds, is a common good that sustains the sovereignty of knowledge, assuring its production, diffusion and preservation in Open Access.
• Open Access guarantees the dissemination of research results to the whole of society, so the economic investment of all areas of the State must be consistent with this universal benefit.
• To improve the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge, the transition to digital communication is an essential axis, which must be based on an interoperable, sustainable, cooperative and interinstitucional scientific journals and databases system.

• The principles of Open Access imply an evolution of the systems of evaluation towards more open models, comprising of the multiple activities of the researchers and expressive of the conditions of knowledge production. Consequently, the Impact Factor and the H Index must be exceeded as indicators of quality and performance, offering new data for the generation of diverse, transparent and specific metrics for each disciplinary field.
• Open Access promotes the dissemination and use of research results freely and costless to authors and readers, therefore it claims due citation to authors and publishers, the impediment to any type of marketing and the obligation to share the work and its derivatives in the same way it was created.

http://www.amelica.org