AmeliCA (concept)

AmeliCA (Conocimiento Abierto para América Latina y el Sur Global — “Open Knowledge for Latin America and the Global South”) is a non-profit, academic-led open-access infrastructure and advocacy initiative founded in 2018 by Redalyc-UAEM, CLACSO, UNESCO, and the University of Antioquia, later joined by additional partners across Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain, and Portugal. It positions itself as an explicit alternative to the article-processing-charge (APC) model that dominates Northern-led open-access reform, arguing that Global South scholarship should not have to pay to publish or pay to read.

What AmeliCA does

Rather than running its own peer-reviewed titles from scratch, AmeliCA builds and operates shared, non-commercial publishing infrastructure: participating journals keep their own independent editorial boards while AmeliCA supplies XML-based production tooling (Marcalyc), hosting, indexing, and technical standards so that small, often volunteer-run scholarly-society journals can publish to modern technical standards without commercial-publisher costs. Every AmeliCA-affiliated journal publishes as diamond open access — free to read and free to publish in, with production costs absorbed by universities, scholarly societies, and public funders rather than charged to authors or readers.

How it differs from adjacent initiatives

AmeliCA is not Redalyc, though it grew out of that community: Redalyc remains primarily an indexing and bibliographic database of Latin American journals, while AmeliCA is the publishing-infrastructure and advocacy layer built on top of it. It is also not SciELO, the older, separately governed, Brazil-founded regional open-access platform — the two share a similar diamond-OA, publicly-funded philosophy and often coordinate policy positions, but are distinct organisations. And it is explicitly not aligned with Plan S/cOAlition S: AmeliCA has publicly criticised Plan S’s reliance on APCs and transformative agreements as a model that assumes Northern-style institutional wealth and risks excluding under-resourced regions and languages.

Why it matters for research administrators

Institutions with collaborators in AmeliCA-participating regions may find those partners publish through diamond-OA journals rather than APC-funded ones — relevant when tracking open-access compliance, budgeting for article-processing charges (none is owed on an AmeliCA-model journal), or comparing regional open-science strategy against funder mandates written with a Northern APC market in mind. See also Global South publishing and FOLEC/CLACSO Latin America research assessment reform for the wider regional policy context.