Sustainability of Latin American initiatives that publish open access journals using the XML-JATS standard: the case Redalyc

Objetive. To carry out the sustainability analysis of the Latin American initiative Redalyc.org, based on two fundamental aspects, the economic and the need for its existence. Method. the measurement of the man-hours required to publish a scientific article is carried out, using Marcalyc. 40 articles published in scientific journals from different areas of knowledge, belonging to Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, are processed using this tool. Results. it is obtained that the markup takes on average 86.3% (SD = 4.2%) of the total processing time, distributed in almost equal parts between the content of the article (body) (average = 48.3%, SD = 9.5%) and references, notes, acknowledgement, appendix and glossary (back) (mean = 43.2%, SD = 9.3%). Conclusions. The sustainability of Redalyc's publication model is more economically guaranteed for two reasons; 1) the processing time to generate XML-JATS is much shorter than SciELO, and 2) it uses a markup tool (Marcalyc), which can be used directly by the editorial team of a journal, without the need for specialized technical knowledge. This favors the sustainability of the scientific publication model in Latin American open access and returns the control of the publication process to the editors.