Censorship in Latin America

Latinamerican Scholar Associations

Ref.: Academic Censorship in Latin America

Dear Chairmans:

I have the honor to address you in order to install among social scientists and politicians one of the most glaring civil and human rights violations experienced in the electronic age by researchers and scholars in less developed countries: the boycott of the rights to practice scientific research, to communicate and be scholarly informed.
As is worldwide known, since the Renaissance, scientific knowledge is experiencing an irreversible and unbridled fragmentation; and since the hegemony of Neoliberal policies, an increasing privatization process. Paradoxically, to cope both universal phenomenons, while in the First World students and researchers suffer an increasing information overload that intoxicates their harts and minds causing them deep stress, anxiety and scepticism, in the less developed world (LDW) students and scholars are subject to information anaemia and electronic garbage pollution. The strong need to break this triple symptom (illness, apartheid and censorship), and therefore the need to revert the fragmentation, privatization and concentration trends, that are undermining academic freedoms and the formation of an electronically enlightened global elite, is becoming every day more demanding, to such a degree that an appeal for an international solidarity has become imperative.
This letter is submitted with the purpose of promoting debate among communication, information and human rights scientists as to what extent the practice of scientific research should or should not be regarded as a fundamental civil and human right, to what degree electronic information for academic study should be subject to democratic deliberation and scientific priorities rather than to a colonization process run by market forces and business profits, and how the scientific institutions of less developed countries could reach the electronic connections and the paid electronic licenses to periodical journals published online. It is my hope that unlimited access to electronic information firmly combined with more democratic intellectual practices and philosophical debates have to be raised and endorsed as legitimate demands in the struggle against knowledge fragmentation, commercial-academic censorships and new types of monopolized and established or fixed knowledges and on behalf of academic freedoms, extended democracy, and the principles of open communication and education and equal opportunities worldwide.
The relevance of these online and full-text electronic journals for the progress and integration of scientific research and for any country that wants to engage in science and research activities as a platform for an economic, social and cultural takeoff (such were the cases of Ireland and Finland) should be considered obvious. However, scholars find themselves in circumstances similar to those experienced by the most backward and oppressed European and Middle East countries during the Renaissance --when Gutenberg invented the printing press-- being condemned to continue using parchment, papyrus and clay tablets. Moreover, the amazing electronic censorship to which scholars are subjected by corrupt governments has relatively increased in the recent times because the number of paid subscriptions to online Databases has skyrocketed while the percentage of free access scientific sites have dramatically decreased.
Moreover, the contradiction and the hypocrisy of less developed governments could partially be undone if superfluous expenses be punished, and if their budgets could be reassigned. Adversely, research institutions permanently suffer budget cuts and incur extra expenses, that should be reallocated. Research institutions in less developed countries have sistematically boycotted the paid subscription to those online Databases, monopolized by multinational electronic editors, such as J-Store, Pro-Quest, Elsevier, Carfax, Sage, Kluwer, Blackwell, II Mulino, Swets Backsets Service, Frank Cass, Chadwyck-Healy, Bell Howell, Gale´s Ready Reference Shelf, Project Muse, CERN Library, Spring Harbour Laboratory Press, Allen Press, MALMAD, and Medline among many other Databases.
However, governments in these less developed nations persist in giving priority to the resolution of the financial gap with institutions of international banking, without any commisseration to the scientific and cultural censorship we are experiencing, condemning our scholars to practice a marginal and obsolete science, unable to compete with the cutting edge research of central countries. This contradictory practice and this hypocrisy in discourses, that no crisis can justify, looks down on science, leads to a persistent brain drain, and makes it impossible for young scholars living in the First World to return to their countries of origin.
As one of thousands of isolated scholars in less developed countries, the obstacles and difficulties to reach and challenge international organizations, multinational electronic editors and corrupt governments are infinite and overwhelming. Therefore, I got convinced that this is not merely an academic or legal issue, as has been presented by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) and the Public Library of Science (PLoS), but essentially a political issue and that one way to raise it successfully and at a global scale is to incorporate this issue in the political agenda by appealing to those who have become internationally acknowledged as perseverant defenders of human rights. Hence, I have sent this message to Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela, Jesse Jackson, Mary Robinson, and Edward Kennedy, the world statesmen to whom any scholar and research institution in less developed nations could trust the defense of these new kind of rights.
Also, I have sent this message to hundreds of Associations, Academies, scientific institutions, and communication, information and education departments at European, Australian and Northamerican universities; and to associations, journals, newspapers and discussion forums and portals that belong to Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Eastern Europe. However, I am conscious that a successful international campaign should be summoned collectively.
Finally, I appeal to your solidarity, urging you to debate within your associations and among your colleagues any kind of ideas and strategies susceptible of helping this struggle.
Yours truly,
Eduardo R. Saguier
Senior Researcher (CONICET, Argentina)
http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/announce/show.cgi?ID=130901

The Public Library of Social Sciences and the Humanities (PLoSSH)

The Public Library of Social Sciences and the Humanities (PLoSSH) should be a non-profit organization of scholars committed to making the world's scholar literature freely accessible to the public around the world, for the benefit of the social sciences and the humanities, and the public good.
We are working for the establishment of international online public libraries of social sciences and the humanites that will archive and distribute the complete contents of published scholar articles and reviews, and foster the development of new ways to search, interlink and integrate the information that is currently partitioned into millions of separate reviews and reports and segregated into thousands of different journals, each with its own restrictions on access, in a similar way to what has been done by the Public Library of Science (PLoS).
As a step toward these goals, I am circulating the following open letter to urge publishers to allow the articles and reviews that have appeared in their journals to be distributed freely by independent, online public libraries of social sciences and the humanites.
Our initiative is prompting significant and welcome steps by many scientific publishers towards freer access to published research. We must make every effort to give our full support to those journals that adopt the policy proposed in the open letter.
We plan to establish a non-profit scientific publisher under the banner of Public Library of Social Sciences and the Humanities (PLoSSH) operated for the benefit of both the social sciences and the humanities, and will begin advocating the publication exclusively in those journals that fully realize the principles of this movement. With your participation, vision and energy we can establish a new model for scientific publishing.
Please join us in this effort.

OPEN LETTER

The Public Library of Social Sciences and the Humanities (PLoSSH) initiative begins with the circulation of the following open letter, urging publishers to allow the articles and reviews that have appeared in their journals to be distributed freely by independent, online public libraries of social sciences and the humanities.
If you support this initiative, we ask you to sign the following open letter.

We support the establishment of an online public library that would provide the full contents of the published record of research and scholarly discourse in the social sciences and the humanities in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form, similar to what is being done in the Public Library of Science (PLoS). Establishment of this public library would vastly increase the accessibility and utility of the scientific literature, enhance scientific productivity, and catalyze integration of the disparate communities of knowledge and ideas in social sciences and the humanities.
We recognize that the publishers of journals in the social sciences and the humanities have a legitimate right to a fair financial return for their role in scholar communication. We believe, however, that the permanent, archival record of scholarly research and ideas should neither be owned nor controlled exclusively by publishers, but should belong to the public, and should be freely available through an international online public library.
To encourage the publishers of our journals to support this endeavor, we pledge that, beginning in September, 2002, we will publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to, only those scholarly and scientific journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free distribution rights to any and all original research articles and reviews that they have published, through online public resources, within 6 months of their initial publication date.