Opportunities for scholarly publishing services in Latin America

Latin American countries have a long tradition of sharing knowledge and started practicing Open Access (OA) long before OA was even a term. The region launched its own indexes and information systems, which introduced new ways to evaluate the quality of Latin American journals and opened a space for those that did not meet the requirements of the northern or private indexes, and created a new set of quality standards, both in the publication workflow and the implementation of technology and best practices. The journal management software, Open Journal Systems (OJS), helps journals meet those standards while opening a market opportunity for professionalization and technical service providers. This project aims to understand the reasons behind the decisions of Latin American academic publishers when contracting such technical services, what services they outsource from commercial organizations, and what added value they are finding through a series of interviews with universities in Mexico and Colombia, and an analysis of service providers and customer profiles in the region.