Research Center on the Circulation of Knowledge CECIC, UNCuyo-FCPyS, Mendoza, Argentina

The Opening Research Assessment to Multi-Contexts (OpenRAM) project was approved by the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON), under the call HORIZON-MSCA-2025-SE-01. The project will run for four years, starting in September 2026 and ending in late 2030. Technological developments in open scientific infrastructure, exchanges and mobility, as well as international academic events are planned at our Faculty.

OpenRAM seeks to transform research assessment by moving beyond publication-based indicators such as Journal Impact Factor and addressing their systemic biases. Current systems often overlook societal impact, undervalue diverse outputs like datasets or policy contributions, and marginalize knowledge from underrepresented regions. To respond to these challenges, OpenRAM introduces the Multiversatory, a participatory and federated living lab that integrates diverse data sources and develops context-sensitive indicators. The Multiversatory combines conceptual development, empirical case studies, and capacity building to create fairer and more transparent assessment practices. It promotes inclusive and participatory approaches, addresses epistemic inequities by making visible diverse knowledge systems, and fosters equitable collaborations between the Global North and South. Case studies will explore career assessment, institutional evaluation, and national research systems, testing how plural and conditional metrics can be applied across different contexts. By aligning with global initiatives such as DORA, the Leiden Manifesto, CoARA, the project operationalises responsible assessment principles through open infrastructures and participatory methodologies. Its interdisciplinary consortium, spanning Europe, Latin America, and Africa, will collaborate through secondments, peer learning, and training activities, ensuring that outputs are transferable and sustainable. OpenRAM will produce federated open infrastructures, participatory frameworks, and multilingual training programmes that strengthen the visibility of diverse research contributions. Scientifically it widens what counts in evaluation, economically it reduces dependence on proprietary systems through open tools, and societally it supports more equitable recognition of research aligned with local and global challenges. In doing so, OpenRAM aims to deliver practical frameworks that make responsible research assessment a reality.

WP3 investigates data practices and research assessment through experiences (case studies, technical implementations and participatory actions) on local governance observing epistemic equity, and equal partnerships, addressing the complexities of multi-scalar interactions in research evaluation systems. The work package comprises three interconnected tasks:

By integrating these components, WP3 aims to provide actionable insights and tools to democratize research evaluation and enhance global equity in knowledge production. The outcomes will feed into broader frameworks for federated infrastructures, contributing to the project’s overarching goal of opening research assessments to multicontextual considerations.

Within the framework of two initiatives funded by the European Union—Diamond Future (Berlin University Alliance) and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions program (Horizon Europe)—the teams at Latindex (National Autonomous University of Mexico), HERA (National University of La Plata), and OLIVA-CECIC (National University of Cuyo) are consolidating a collaboration aimed at promoting open, non-commercial infrastructures. This alliance promotes innovative tools and metrics to transform research evaluation, with a focus on high-quality regional journals.

The novelty is the inclusion of Latindex as a source and resource for the HERA (Tool for the Enrichment of Academic Resources) platform, which substantially expands the visibility of the Latindex 2.0 Catalog and strengthens its impact on search, evaluation, and recognition circuits for regional scientific production. The collaborative technical development consists of a system of equivalencies between the URL (identified with a “folio” in Latindex) and the ISSN of each journal, allowing searches in HERA by ISSN and incorporating the reports generated into Latindex.

This advance strengthens immediate interoperability and facilitates more consistent access from external tools, expanding the number of users who can find these journals. New stages of joint work are planned to expand the harvest of the Latindex article discoverer.

Access the explanatory video:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZEAFxW4wN2YpFYRSr9q8lHHV2sPff68Y/view?usp=drive_link

This collaboration is directly aligned with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 17 (Partnerships for the Goals), which fosters revitalizing global partnerships for sustainable development through multi-stakeholder cooperation. The Latindex-HERA-CECIC alliance, based on three public universities in Latin America and supported by Horizon Europe, exemplifies cooperation that mobilizes the exchange of knowledge, technical capacity, and technology to strengthen open academic infrastructures. It also contributes to SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) through this collaborative technological solution—the URL-ISSN system—which improves scientific information infrastructure, fosters innovation in research evaluation methods, and especially supports regional production.

This collaborative work is part of a shared diagnosis among the three universities involved. A significant portion of quality journals—non-commercial, self-managed by academic communities, and aligned with diamond open access—are not adequately collected by global aggregators. In this context, facilitating access to the rich information in the Latindex 2.0 Catalog (including criteria met/not met) is strategic for information science, bibliometric studies, scientific evaluation, and public policy.

Next Wednesday, January 28, at 6 a.m. Argentina time, Osvaldo Gallardo will present “A quantitative and qualitative approach to the political economy of scientific publications in a challenging context. Argentine researchers and article processing charges (APCs): bibliometrics, representations, and practices.” The event will be held in person at Humboldt University in Berlin, with transmission via Zoom.

Globally, concerns are rising about the profit-driven scientific publishing model, which, under the guise of (commercial) Open Access, continually increases the Article Processing Charges (APCs) required to publish in an ever-growing number of scientific journals. In Argentina, the scientific community faces intense pressure from ongoing government attacks and substantial budget cuts. In this challenging context, how are researchers’ practices and perceptions evolving?

In the first part of this presentation, I share the results of a research project examining the impact and practices of researchers in peripheral countries who regularly face the challenge of paying APCs. Based on a survey conducted between 2023 and 2024 in Argentina, South Africa, Mexico, and Brazil, I briefly highlight the differences across countries, disciplines, and between junior and senior researchers.

In the second part, I present preliminary results from a more focused analysis. From a Bourdieu-inspired perspective, the distinctive aspects of the Argentine case offer a rich opportunity to reflect on how local and global conditions influence the position and disposition of researchers under political and academic pressures. To do this, I examine three analytical dimensions: 1) whether Argentine-based researchers’ publication practices have changed (or not) in recent years, using open bibliometric sources; 2) the waivers policy of the main profit-oriented publishing companies for these authors; and 3) the researchers’ perspective on the APC-based publishing model in 2023, on the eve of the far-right government’s start, and the evolving (or unchanged) practices and viewpoints after two years of threats and budget cuts.

Link de Zoom

https://hu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/66137712462?pwd=bTF4VG9Ca1BxMkFqOE9xTFZxYldWQT09
Meeting-ID: 661 3771 2462

The results of the international survey conducted by the GRIP-APC project are now openly available in Zenodo.

Between 2023 and 2024, a team of international researchers, led by Fernanda Beigel (CECIC-CONICET) and funded by the Global Research institute of Paris, studied the impact of article processing charges (APCs) in four countries: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa. The results of the first phase of the project offer insight into how scientists in non-hegemonic contexts respond to transformations in the publishing ecosystem resulting from the development of open access.

The study collected primary data from 13,577 responses to an online questionnaire administered to scientific researchers in four target countries between August 2023 and February 2024. The main objective of this survey was to gather detailed information about researchers’ positions in their national fields, their publishing practices, access to funding, and their perceptions of open access and article processing charges (APCs). The research team designed the survey and translated it into Portuguese and Spanish, incorporating adaptations to each country’s scientific systems and career guidelines. Respondent confidentiality was prioritized, with all sensitive information removed from the dataset prior to publication.

The GRIP-APC study has generated a comprehensive set of resources that broaden our understanding of open access publishing in the Global South. Key results include an open database with the survey, references to articles in indexed journals on APC practices and national funding agency policies, a technical report on the context in Brazil, and preprints that preview future scientific communications by the team. Together, these contributions provide a better understanding of the ways in which researchers in Latin America and Africa are facing the new trends in scientific communication. At the same time, they offer recommendations on how to address the challenges that the commercial business models pose to equitable participation in the circulation of knowledge.

All results are openly available in the project’s Zenodo Community. Below is a list of all the resources related to the project that are openly available.

Gallardo, O., Appel, A. L., Bruccoleri Ochoa, M., GRIP-APC, T., Milia, M., Montoya, V., van Schalkwyk, F., & Beigel, F. (2025). A comparative analysis of open science, access, APC, and circulation of knowledge. A dataset from a survey of researchers in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa. [Data set]. Global Research Institute of Paris. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16414892

Gallardo, O., Milia, M., Appel, A. L., GRIP-APC Team, & van Schalkwyk, F. (2025). When researchers pay to publish: Results from a survey on APCs in four countries (Version v1) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16463507

Appel, A. L., Milia, M., Rodriguez Medina, L., GRIP-APC Team, & Beigel, F. (2025). Saberes y prácticas de publicación en acceso abierto: un estudio comparativo sobre Brasil, Argentina y México. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16461364

Albagli, S., Appel, A. L., Pacanaro Trinca, T., Alves, L. de A., & Leite, N. (2024). Uma Análise Comparativa da Ciência Aberta, do Acesso Aberto e da Circulação de Conhecimento na América Latina e na África: Relatório Preliminar Brasil. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10694976

Beigel, F., Gallardo, O., Gomez, M. S., & Prado, F. C. (2025). Publicación en acceso abierto y costos por Article Processing Charges (APC) en Argentina. Revue D’anthropologie Des Connaissances, 19(2). https://doi.org/10.4000/140pa

Beigel, F., & Montoya, V. (2025). Perceptions, défis et prises de positions concernant l’Article Processing Charges (APC) dans la publication scientifique : une enquête auprès des chercheur·e·s du CONICET en Argentine. Social Science Information, 64(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/05390184251351425

Terlizzi, M. S., Zukerfeld, M., & Beigel, F. (2025). Open access, “piracy” and Article Processing Charges (APC) in Argentina: an informed policy for the national research funding agency. https://doi.org/10.1590/0001-3765202520241184

Soto-Herrera, D. A., Beigel, F., & Pallares Delgado, C. O. (2025). Costos de publicación en acceso abierto bajo el modelo APC: Argentina y Colombia. https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.rib.v48n1e357790

CECIC is organizing the Workshop for an Inclusive Open Science at the Einstein Center for Digital Future, in collaboration with the Berlin University Alliance and the Berlin Center for Global Engagement. The event will take place on July 14, 2025. The program consists of four panels featuring over 15 speakers from universities in Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Ukraine, South Africa, Argentina, the Netherlands, Brazil, Colombia, and Canada.

Currently, several studies on the balance of the 20 years of the Budapest Open Access Initiative have been highlighting its intentions regarding scientific democratization; However, they have also pointed out various complexities. Indeed, among other things, the interests of the academic publishing sector have been perpetuated, in particular those related to the so-called “high-impact” journals that circulate in the mainstream, continue to struggle to sustain certain models of privatist financing via onerous payments. On the other hand, there is also a growing phenomenon in journals originally supported by open access, which have been demanding increasingly high fees for article processing charges (APCs), thus eclipsing the achievements of the open access movement.

However, it is known that in all regions it has been strongly assuming a boost related to the development of open digital research infrastructure. Across regions, the diverse momentum related to the development of open digital research infrastructure is observed. Europe and Latin America have strong initiatives and/or continental networks in terms of their development, consolidating the focus on knowledge as a public good. In the United States, the federal government was one of the most important drivers of the practice of open science, although the current situation is changing priorities. There is a growing interest on the part of regional and sub-regional bodies in fostering open science efforts along with the transformation towards responsible research assessment.

Based on all this, this workshop seeks to reflect on the paths towards current open science. To this end, 4 panels have been designed under face-to-face and virtual mode, where more than 15 exhibitors from different universities in Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Ukraine, South Africa, Argentina, the Netherlands, Brazil, Colombia and Canada will participate. The program is shared below:

The CECIC Workshop “Convergences between bibliometrics and prosopography: coverage studies and asymmetries in the circulation of knowledge” will be held on November 11 and 12 at the Talampaya Salle of the CCT Mendoza between 9:30 am and 5:30 pm. It aims to discuss the results of the international research projects conducted by CECIC during 2023 and 2024: the international survey of publication practices and APC costs; the PRISA-AUF project on Bibliometrics and Prosopography. CECIC researchers from different provinces (San Juan, Córdoba, Buenos Aires and Misiones) will participate, as well as teams from other countries (Quebec-Canada, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Mexico).

MontoyaAlgaraazyCastillo

Baranger

Fernanda

Luca

NataliayExequiel

Vincent

Natsumi

MaximilianoSalatino

Benz

Alysson

MalenaM

ErwinK

Diego

Carolina

The scientific meeting will be organized in 4 thematic axes:

1. Inclusiveness and exclusiveness in Open Science
2. Prosopography, bibliometrics and evaluation policies
3. Citation and publishing practices
4. Non-hegemonic publishing circuits and gender asymmetries

Among the speakers who will take part in the Workshop are: Natalia Aguirre-Ligüera (Universidad de la República), Victor Algañaraz (Universidad Nacional de San Juan),  Denis Baranger (Universidad Nacional de Misiones), Fernanda Beigel (CONICET-Universidad Nacional de Cuyo), Pierre Benz (University of Montreal), Lucía Céspedes (Érudit/University of Montreal), Alysson Fernandes Mazoni (Universidade Estadual de Campinas), Exequiel Fontans (Universidad de la República), Osvaldo Gallardo (CONICET-Universidad Nacional de Cuyo), Diego Kozlowski (University of Montreal), Erwin Humberto Krauskopf Poblete (University of the Americas), Vincent Larivière (University of Montreal), Malena Méndez Isla (University of Montreal),  Víctor Montoya (Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero), Carolina Pradier (University of Montreal), Maximiliano Salatino (CONICET-Universidad Nacional de Cuyo), Natsumi Solange Shokida (University of Montreal).

The program and registration for virtual or on-site participation can be made below.