This post is a preliminary review of Debat & Babini’s preprint PlanS in Latin America: a precautionary note (citation details and links below).
Preliminary review: Latin America has long been a leader in open access, and had achieved substantially the goals of PlanS more than a decade ago. In 2007, I wrote: “Scielo is an excellent example of what can be accomplished through a nationally subsidized open access program. While the Scielo portal encompasses the scholarly work of many latin countries, Brazil alone, in 2005, brought 160 fully open access journals to the world at a very modest cost of only $1 million dollars” (republished here).
This article is written by experts without peers, and does not really require peer review. This perspective is every bit as worthy of consideration by policy-makers everywhere as anything written by the EU-based OA2020 initiative.
This post will be accompanied by an open offer to conduct a full peer review (with conditions), and some observations on open peer review that are meant to stimulate discussion, however this affirmation of the leadership of Debat, Babini, Scielo & Redalyc warrants a unique post.
Humberto Debat, Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (IPAVE-CIAP-INTA), Argentina
Dominique Babini, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO), Argentina
Latin America has historically led a firm and rising Open Access movement and represents the worldwide region with larger adoption of Open Access practices. Argentina has recently expressed its commitment to join Plan S, an initiative from a European consortium of research funders oriented to mandate Open Access publishing of scientific outputs. Here we suggest that the potential adhesion of Argentina or other Latin American nations to Plan S, even in its recently revised version, ignores the reality and tradition of Latin American Open Access publishing, and has still to demonstrate that it will encourage at a regional and global level the advancement of non-commercial Open Access initiatives.
Access to full-text in English:
https://peerj.com/preprints/27834/
Access to full-text in Spanish:
https://zenodo.org/record/3332621#.XSekx-hKg2z
Cite as:
Morrison, H. (2019). Latin America long-time peerless leader in open access. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir Les Savoirs Communs. Retrieved from https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/07/15/latin-america-long-time-peerless-leader-in-open-access/
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs 
Dear Dr. Morrison
We thank you very much for your kind offer and interest in our paper (preprint).
We delightedly accept your offer to conduct a full peer review of our work. We are planning to submit our piece soon (target journal = decision pending), and we will contact you directly to let you know if the journal who handles our paper is in line with your conditions.
We applaud your open review initiative.
Sincerely,
Humberto & Dominique
Thanks. I’ve posted my comments on PeerJ and will get started on a second more thorough read – I should be familiar with this literature anyway.