What Latin America Has Taught Us About Building Scholarly Infrastructure
“Diamond Open Access” is not new. Latin America was publishing free to read and publish scholarship long before it had a name, and before it was emphasized internationally. Learn how Latin America has always been a leader in open access publishing, and how the region has been a major influence on how PKP has developed OJS.
Long before the term “Diamond Open Access” existed, or became a term international policy bodies reached for, it was simply how most of Latin America published research. Public universities ran their own journals and provided hosting either internally or by partnering with fellow institutions. Editors worked without author fees because the idea of charging researchers to publish, or readers to read, never took hold the way it did elsewhere.
Latin Americans built a scholar-led publishing culture on their own terms. The adoption of PKP’s Open Journal Systems (OJS) emerged naturally as a result of values alignment: institutional ownership, non-commercial governance, and open access.
PKP did not bring this ecosystem into being, but it found a home in one and has spent two decades being shaped by it—in our software priorities, documentation, training programs, and research.
How OJS Helped an Ecosystem Grow
For thousands of university-run and society-run journals, OJS supplied something the region’s publishing culture had not previously had at scale: a standardized, low-cost technical backbone that could handle submission tracking, peer review, layout, and indexing without requiring each journal to build its own system or pay for a commercial platform.
This end-to-end platform let small editorial teams at regional public universities run peer-review processes as rigorous and procedurally as those at much larger institutions, and it made journals interoperable with the metadata standards that indexes like DOAJ, Latindex, and Redalyc required for inclusion.
The scale that followed is now one of the most cited facts about OJS worldwide: a large share of the platform’s global installations are concentrated in Latin America, with 8,413 journals in the region as of 2025. Much of this growth occurred through institutional adoption rather than individual journals seeking out software independently.
National networks such as Redalyc and SciELO encouraged member journals toward common technical standards; university library systems rolled out shared OJS instances that dozens of journals could use without each needing their own server or systems administrators; and national science agencies, in several countries, made a degree of technical standardization a condition of funding or indexing support.
That growth reshaped OJS itself. Multilingual interface support, workflow features tailored to volunteer-run editorial teams, and integrations with regional indexing services all stemmed from demands that surfaced from the community, including Latin American users.
PKP’s own research has documented this dynamic directly, treating the region not as a market to study from the outside but as the source of much of what the organization now understands about sustaining non-commercial publishing.
Community Knowledge as Infrastructure
For those involved with software sustainability and contribution, software is a visible part of this infrastructure, but it is not the largest part. Sustaining thousands of non-commercial journals requires documentation, translation, metadata expertise, and governance—work that rarely appears in adoption statistics but without which the software is unusable.
In Latin America, this work has largely been done by the community itself: editors training the editors who come after them, librarians running metadata workshops for smaller institutions, and university presses documenting migrations in Spanish.
This is also where the region’s dependence on partner organizations becomes visible, and vice versa. For example, DOAJ’s indexing criteria have pushed journals toward more transparent editorial policies, often ahead of national requirements. Crossref and DataCite have made persistent identifiers accessible to journals that could never have afforded commercial DOI registration on their own, frequently through agreements negotiated by regional consortia rather than individual publishers.
No single organization runs this infrastructure. It holds together through overlapping contributions from regional networks, national library systems, service providers, and volunteer contributors, with PKP occupying one part of a much larger structure.
Building a Spanish-Language Ecosystem
A significant share of this knowledge work happens in Spanish, and it is a condition for the infrastructure functioning at all. An editor working through partially translated documentation is, in practice, operating with degraded infrastructure regardless of what the software can do.
PKP brings together a volunteer community from Latin America and Spain to translate the software, adapt, and often originate documentation that reflects how OJS is actually used in Spanish-language contexts. Further, PKP School develops Spanish-language courses, extending training to editors who would otherwise be excluded from professional development available to English-speaking colleagues, and the offers the spanish-speaking community a space to share experiences and solving issues with PKP Forum’s Spanish Regional Network. Partner institutions across the region have independently produced guides and workshops that circulate well beyond their institutions of origin, forming a distributed, multilingual knowledge base that no single organization owns (e.g., Seminario Permanente de Editores).
Professionalization in a Changing Assessment Landscape
Alongside this infrastructure work, the conversation about what counts as a rigorous journal is shifting. Mexico’s science and technology authority, SECIHTI, has formally established the Sistema Nacional de Publicaciones Científicas y Humanísticas (SNPCyH), a policy instrument aimed at strengthening the country’s ecosystem of non-commercial, open-access academic journals. Notably, the system evaluates journals on editorial presentation, editorial policy and management, and content accessibility explicitly without relying on citation metrics or impact-factor-style indicators.
Early discussion has centered less on indexing thresholds than on editorial quality, research integrity, and bibliodiversity, acknowledging that a healthy ecosystem needs journals publishing in multiple languages and on regional topics, not only those competing for international citation counts.
Mexico’s process should not be read as a regional template; assessment frameworks vary considerably by country. What appears more broadly is a shift in emphasis, visible in Mexico and in policy conversations elsewhere, away from indexing compliance as an end in itself and toward the editorial practices indexing was always meant to signal.
Looking Ahead to the Latin American Open Science Forum
That conversation will continue this August 2026, when the Second Latin American Open Science Forum (Foro Latinoamericano de Ciencia Abierta) will convene academics, researchers, editors, and PKP software users from across the region together in Heredia, Costa Rica. The forum’s second edition follows an inaugural gathering in Quito.
PKP will contribute workshops and panel sessions, and will spend at least as much time listening: these forums work best as spaces where attendees compare notes across national contexts, and where PKP staff hear directly what is and is not working in the software and documentation it maintains.
Closing Reflection
None of the above suggests the region’s publishing ecosystem is without strain. Editorial teams remain under-resourced, and the pressure to align with international indexing criteria has not disappeared even as its terms are renegotiated.
But Latin America’s central contribution to global scholarly communication has never been a promise of frictionless success. Rather, Latin America has shown through the decades that non-commercial, scholar-led publishing can work at scale, sustained by a layered infrastructure – technical, linguistic, editorial, and institutional – that no single organization builds alone.
PKP’s software plays a critical role in this infrastructure, but it is one among many, including DOAJ, Crossref, DataCite, regional networks, university libraries, and the countless volunteer editors and translators whose names rarely appear in any organization’s annual report.
PKP’s engagement with Latin America has brought us a clearer sense of what is needed for scholarly infrastructure to be embedded in the community and to be truly sustainable. PKP’s work in the region is a standing reminder that the people who understand this best are usually the ones already doing the work.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Famira Racy, Juan Pablo Alperin, Marc Bria, and Pedro López Casique for their helpful reviews of this post
Sources
- Casas Niño de Rivera, A., Clinio, A., & Alperín, J. P. (2025). De Acceso Abierto a Ciencia Abierta: Lecciones de PKP en América Latina. SciELO Preprints. https://doi.org/10.1590/SciELOPreprints.13026
- Alperin, J.P.; Stranack, K.; Garnett, A. On the Peripheries of Scholarly Infrastructure: A Look at the Journals Using Open Journal Systems. Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators | València (Spain) | September 14-16, 2016. http://ocs.editorial.upv.es/index.php/STI2016/STI2016/paper/viewFile/4543/2327
- SECIHTI (Secretaría de Ciencia, Humanidades, Tecnología e Innovación). “Acerca del SNPCyH.” https://secihti.mx/snpcyh/acerca-del-snpcyh/ — see also the published guidelines, Lineamientos del SNPCyH (Diario Oficial de la Federación, 27 May 2026): https://secihti.mx/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lineamientos_SNPCyH_DOF_270526.pdf
- Foro Latinoamericano de Ciencia Abierta (4–6 August 2026), Universidad Nacional, Campus El Higuerón, Heredia, Costa Rica. https://indico.congresos.ucr.ac.cr/event/1/
- “Foro Latinoamericano de Ciencia Abierta en Quito: Un hito para la comunidad científica.” Gobierno Abierto Ecuador, 19 September 2024. https://www.gobiernoabierto.ec/foro-latinoamericano-de-ciencia-abierta-en-quito-un-hito-para-la-comunidad-cientifica/