Science as a Public Good: The Role of Community and Digital Technologies for Equity, Sustainability and Development in the Global South

Knowledge generation is a recursive and community process that evolves by building on prior knowledge. The non-rivalrous and non-excludable nature of science, that allows it to be a public good, is reinforced when it takes place on the World Wide Web. Digital technologies are keystones for science to provide universal benefit and for enabling the community to collectively sustain it and lead it. Paywalls entail exclusion which affects the least resourced countries and regions. Science as a public good creates a more equitable ecosystem, particularly beneficial for the Global South. The prevailing ecosystem in the Latin American region for the communication of science has been sustained mainly with public funds and it includes non-APC Open Access journals, repositories, and infrastructures. The aim of this paper is to reflect on how information technologies, the WWW and Diamond Open Access (OA) enable science as a public good, also to explore, through the Redalyc database, the involvement of the community in the sustainability of Diamond OA journals and to find evidence on the ―universality‖ of the benefit for authors and readers. The results show that Diamond OA journals are public goods that provide an equitable benefit for authors and readers, and that the academic community are the main sustainers of Diamond OA journals.