Abstract

Pablo Ortellado, Jorge Machado
Public Policy - University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil

The Brazilian Model for Free Access to Scientific Publications

Although Brazil lacks a cohesive national policy for free access to scientific publications, local initiatives by universities, funding agencies and state and federal government make up the framework for a full policy for free access. The paper aims at putting together the pieces and presenting a general picture of what such policy might be:
* free access to all Brazilian theses and dissertations through digital repositories;
* institutional protection for the copying of books for educational purposes;
* fomenting publicly funded peer-reviewed non author-fee free access journals ("platinum road") - peer evaluation has shown that those free access journals associated with the Scielo portal have better quality than traditional journals with restrictive access;
* qualitative (instead of quantitative/ impact based) evaluation for scientists publishing in free access journals.
The paper also points to the limitations and deficiencies of existing policies:
* lack of a clear copyright policy for the free access journals;
* lack of a policy for free access to publicly funded books;
* lack of a policy establishing open format as a standard for scientific communication;
* lack of a "green road" (e.g. preprint repositories) policy for scientists publishing in international journals with restrictive access due to impact factor concerns. The lack of such policy has significant economic consequences. The paper estimates the cost of public expenditure per article in Chemistry, a field where Brazilian scientists tend to publish in international journals with restrictive access and compares it with History, a field where researchers tend to publish in local free access journals. This shows the limitations of national policies in the context of globally structured science.