Carlo V. Caballero Uribe, MD

At the end of last November, UNESCO adopted the first international framework on Open Science. This document was unanimously approved by all 193 countries present at the organization’s 40th General Conference, aiming to make scientific findings more transparent and accessible (1).

According to UNESCO, 70% of scientific publications today are paywalled. However, over the past two years, that proportion dropped to 30% for studies related to the coronavirus—showing that science can indeed be open (2).

For the first time, the document includes a universal definition of open science:

“an inclusive construct that combines various movements and practices aiming to ensure that multilingual scientific knowledge is open, accessible, and reusable for everyone; that scientific collaboration and information sharing are strengthened for the benefit of science and society; and that the processes of creating, evaluating, and communicating scientific knowledge are open to societal actors beyond the traditional scientific community.”
All scientific disciplines are addressed, and its key pillars include open science, open infrastructure, scientific communication, open engagement with society, and dialogue with other knowledge systems (2).

In their unanimous declaration, member states committed to "establishing regional and international funding mechanisms to ensure that all publicly funded research adheres to the principles of open science, seen as a tool to reduce inequalities between countries and ensure the right to scientific progress."

Regarding scientific publishing—books, peer-reviewed articles, reports, and conference abstracts—the document states that they “may be disseminated by publishers on open access online platforms or immediately deposited in open repositories maintained by universities, scholarly societies, public entities, or non-profit organizations working for the public good, ensuring unrestricted access, interoperability, and long-term preservation” (2).

The text emphasizes that pay-to-access publishing models do not align with the recommendations. Moreover, any transfer of copyright should not restrict immediate open access to the content (2).

UNESCO’s recommendations recognize science as a public good, to be managed as a commons by the scientific community. Latin America has a strong tradition of promoting open access through repositories like SciELO, Redalyc, and directories like Latindex. As such, it is one of the regions that most closely aligns with the document’s criteria.

These institutions, along with CLACSO (Latin American Council of Social Sciences), issued a joint statement supporting UNESCO’s Recommendation. According to CLACSO (3), key principles include:

• Inclusion: Equal opportunity for all to access and contribute to open science, regardless of geography, gender, income, language, ethnicity, religion, or other conditions.
• Equity: Sustainable practices, services, and funding models to ensure participation from researchers in less privileged contexts.
• Universal participation: Effective integration of societal actors and marginalized knowledge systems in addressing global challenges.
• Bibliodiversity and multilingualism: Promotion of editorial diversity and publication in multiple languages.
• Publication model: Support for non-commercial models without author fees (APCs).
• Collaboration: Shared, non-profit-oriented open science infrastructures.
• Recognition: Evaluation systems that value the full spectrum of research activity—not just high-impact publications.
• Strengthening of existing initiatives, such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which emphasizes quality over quantity and diverse impact indicators (3).

The current scholarly publishing ecosystem faces serious barriers:

• author-pays models (APCs) that limit participation by underfunded researchers and institutions;
• pressure to publish in international, English-language, indexed journals;
• an overemphasis on quantitative metrics (like impact factor and journal quartiles), often at the expense of research quality (4, 5).

While UNESCO’s Recommendation is a major step, implementing its principles will require creative reforms across the research ecosystem. To achieve an inclusive, equitable, multilingual, diverse, and non-commercial vision of open science, systemic changes in institutional policies and incentive structures are needed.

At PANLAR, we recognized this need for transformation early on. This is how Global Rheumatology was born: a journal for the new era—diamond open access, multilingual, continuously published, non-profit, and institutionally funded to showcase rheumatologic research from the Pan-American region. The journal was recently included in DOAJ—the world’s leading open access directory (6, 7).