Características da via verde para o acesso aberto à informação científica na América Latina

This present work analyzes the characteristics of the green road in Latin America for the development of open access. The green road is one of the two strategies proposed by open access movement to make scientific literature freely available on the internet with minimum restrictions. In practice, it is the deposit of scientific publications in open access digital repositories. In Latin America, the development of these systems by teaching and research institutions, the so-called institutional repositories, are appointed by scientific literature as a promising area for the fulfillment of the purposes of open access, due to the public source of research funding in the region and also to the very features of institutional repositories. For the development of this study it was conducted a systematic literature review, using literature and documents from Google Scholar and Web of Knowledge databases in order to the elaboration of a theoretical lens about the elements that define open access and features institutional repositories. As a result of this step were defined five selection criteria and eight dimensions of analysis for institutional repositories. The elements were used for the selection, mapping and characterization of 84 institutional repositories, that were selected in the a set of 289 digital repositories. In addition to the descriptive analysis of repositories, the open access policies of research funding agencies of Latin American and its relationship with the open access initiatives were investigated, especially those that correspond to the green road. The survey of policies was taken using international directories of open access policies and questionnaires sent to such agencies. As a result, we identified only the initiative of a Chilean agency to promote open access to the results of the research they fund. With this, we concluded that the main Latin American research funding agencies haven’t policy for open access. Overall, the survey results showed that Latin America has significant advances in the development of institutional repositories, as compared to other regions, but it is still very incipient in programs and policies to promote open access by funding institutions of scientific knowledge production in the region.