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Open Access in Latin America

Are there other ways of making Open Access work other than the APC-based model we are used to in Europe and North America?  Sure there are. In this episode, Dr. Arianna Becerril-García talks about the state of Open Access in Latin America.

Becerril-Garica is the chair of AmeliCA and Executive Director of Redalyc.org. She is also a professor at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico.

She talks to us about the value of the scholarly-led, non-profit business model to achieve Open Access. She also addresses their concerns with Plan S.

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Sweden made a new deal

Sweden has made a new deal with the publisher Elsevier. In 2018 the Bibsam Consortium in Sweden canceled their agreement with the publisher Elsevier. The reason for this was not seeing a transition from subscription-based publishing to open access publishing.

Sweden wanted immediate open access to all articles published by Swedish researchers, reading access to all articles in Elsevier and a sustainable price model.

However, in late November of 2019, they made a new agreement with the publisher.

In this episode of Open Science Talk, we talk to the Library Director of Stockholm University, Wilhelm Widmark, who has also been a part of the negotiation team. He shares his thoughts on the new deal and how Sweden has experienced being without an agreement since 2018.

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Publishing in the Global South

During our annual Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing, we had the chance to talk to Samir Hachani, ph.d. and lecturer at the School of Information at the University of Algiers 2.

He was in Norway to talk about The Global South and the challenges of assessment and the implementation by The International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) of a journal publishing practices and standards known as the Journals On Line-project.

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Should you write on Wikipedia?

Picture of Trond Trosterud, our guest at Open Science Talk. Trosterud talks about Wikipedia.

So what should we make of Wikipedia?  We all know that as a student you should be careful about using Wikipedia as a cited source. There is no guarantee that the information is correct.  However, there is no denying that most of us use Wikipedia on a regular basis: When looking up stats on your favorite football player, reading up on your next vacation spot, yes even learning the basics of a field you didn’t study.

In many ways it’s brilliant, and there are good reasons why it’s one of the most used webpages on the internet.

But the question is: Should academics spend their time contributing to Wikipedia? In 2011 the Guardian wrote an article on this: Wikipedia wants more contributions from academics. Clearly, one can see the positive arguments for doing so. The public would have access to information from people who have spent their life studying a specific field, and there are some great communicators and good writers at universities who could explain difficult topics to readers.

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