Toluca, México María Fernanda Zúñiga Gustavo Garduño Latin America’s science in the web. Redalyc’s Case

Science is a productive human practice which involves semi private activities (developed in laboratories, the field or in cabinet work) and a complex public performance exposed in a communication network (which links those activities, their impact, and the scientific communities themselves).

Science is a Community since it is produced by human group gathered among a communication system; a functional set of persons linked more by their common practices (networks) and their signifying products (papers, patents and developments) than by mere proximity, nationality or a certain institutional adscription.

Nowadays, the scientific community worldwide has become an object for different types of studies which have taken full advantage of the new technologies such as internet, massive data bases, on-line records of publication, laboratories and research institutes to establish models based on measurable data.

Statistical information about scientific production constitutes a top resource not just for the internal references in different disciplinary groups of scholars but also to determine the activity of governments and institutions which provide funding and support for research and development activities. The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia USA, Scopus – Elsevier in Holand and Scimago in Spain are, up to date, some of the data bases that count with sufficient information to create indexation systems based on impact, and cartographies of science according to publication, citation and collaboration between authors in different disciplines.

La ciencia que no se ve, no existe

Red ALyC stands for “Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina, el Caribe, España y Portugal” (Latin America, Caribbean, Spain and Portugal’s network of scientific journals). This information system was developed in 2003 as a project supported by Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico.

Red ALyC’s scientific library on line is an open access project that provides full texts, abstracts and direct links to the publishers’ cyber pages for over 550 journals and 123,233 papers. Currently it covers 14 Iberoamerican countries, Brasil and Portugal. Despite red ALyC receives proposals from many other countries and many other media, all journals are submitted to a rigorous revision according to criteria previously accorded and approved by the international scientific committee referred in previous paragraphs.

Scientific information system

Red ALyC’s on line library receives posting proposals from different journals in the world which are specialized in Latin America or which proceed from Latin American institutions. Once received, all journals are submitted to a review process based in a set of criteria previously accorded by an international scientific committee and which respond to the highest international standards. Once they pass this review they are normalized, accepted and included in the general catalog of Red ALyC’s open access library.

Recently, its foray into social-network studies has allowed Red ALyC to become a pioneer in the mapping analysis of regional science. Today Red ALyC has developed an "Atlas of the Ibero-American Science" The "Atlas of the Ibero-American Science" has the distinction of being, so far, the only system in the world to analyze the scientific collaboration networks in the countries of Latin America. It is widely known that most similar atlas "mapped" the science from the information provided in major databases in the world where Latin America's presence is not representative

Institutional Collaboration network

Author Collaboration Network

A local index would work not merely by considering linguistic barriers but by considering the whole disciplinary traditions, the specific demands of geographical areas and the ways of the so called main stream.

2003 a 2008 Socio scientific networks Socio scientific networks Journal inclusion Journal inclusion Bibliometric indicators Bibliometric indicators 2003 a 2008 On line library Use indicators 2009

Red AlyC has developed in its web platform seven different community portals that support specific needs of certain disciplinary fields such as: Public management, Communication sciences, Territorial studies, Politics, Sociology, Education and psychology. These portals content not only direct links to journals in the open access library but also to bases for academic events, calls for papers, links to other sites of interest and even access to repositories.

En noviembre del 2008 Redalyc obtuvo el reconocimiento World Summit Award que otorga la UNESCO, como el mejor portal mexicano en la categoría e-science & technology. En la fase internacional, en marzo del 2009, obtuvo una mención especial en su categoría por la región de América Latina y el Caribe.