Published on: 08/07/2026

From Preprints to Publication: Community-Governed Publishing Across Three Continents

The second session of the ALMASI discussion series brought together speakers from Africa, Europe and Latin America to examine how community-governed approaches to scholarly publishing are taking shape in very different research ecosystems. Over ninety minutes, the discussion moved from preprints and open peer review to curation and infrastructure, showing that while the destination is shared, namely a nonprofit, scholar-led publishing system aligned with Diamond Open Access principles, each region is travelling there by a distinctly different route.

Setting the scene: three landscapes, one ambition

Zehra Taşkın (Hacettepe University) opened the session with an overview of the Diamond Open Access landscape drawing on the ALMASI scoping report. Her central message was that the three regions are not starting from the same place. Europe benefits from coordinated, project-driven support: initiatives such as DIAMAS, and organisations including Science Europe, SPARC Europe, cOAlition S and OpenAIRE, have mapped the landscape and built policy momentum. Latin America, by contrast, did not need to invent Diamond Open Access because it has practised it for decades through pioneering public infrastructures such as SciELO, Redalyc, Latindex and AmeliCA. Africa presents yet another picture: a rich and growing journal landscape, visible through platforms such as AJOL, but one where systematic mapping, sustainable funding and shared infrastructure remain works in progress. The comparison set the tone for the session: the question is not whether community-driven publishing is possible, but how each region can build on its own strengths while learning from the others.

Africa: building infrastructure and capacity together

Femi Qudus Arogundade (WACREN) presented the African perspective through COPPHA, the Coalition for Open Access Publishing of Public Health in Africa, and its platform COPPHA PublishNow. What distinguished the African story was its emphasis on building both infrastructure and capacity at the same time. COPPHA emerged from research showing that African public health researchers face significant barriers to publishing, from article processing charges they cannot afford to limited experience with peer review. The response has been deliberately holistic: training courses on peer review and open publishing, delivered with LIBSENSE and Peoples-Praxis, reached participants of whom around three quarters were early career researchers, most with little or no prior peer review experience. That trained community now feeds into COPPHA PublishNow, an open platform powered by Kotahi and operated by WACREN, which implements the Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) model: researchers post preprints, receive open, citable reviews with persistent identifiers, and can then take their work onwards to a journal, an overlay journal or a repository. Femi was candid that the model does not eliminate reviewer scarcity, but argued that pairing training with infrastructure is how a sustainable reviewing culture is grown rather than assumed.

Latin America: a critical voice from a mature ecosystem

Patricia Pedri (Federal University of Pernambuco) offered a deliberately provocative Latin American contribution on open peer review, between theory and practice. Speaking from a region with a long-established public, free publishing infrastructure, her concern was not how to build openness but how to keep it genuinely democratising. Her research shows a striking paradox: although Brazil dominates both the debate and the practice of open peer review, with SciELO requiring published review reports for indexed journals, the theoretical foundations Latin American authors cite still come overwhelmingly from Europe and the United States, and the available technological solutions are foreign and mostly paid. She warned that open peer review, like open science generally, can be absorbed by commercial publishing oligopolies using the very same democratising discourse, and argued that openness is only decolonising when accompanied by cognitive and social justice. Her closing appeal, woven from verses by Caetano Veloso, Cazuza and Emicida, was that Latin America must not be left parking cars at the party of open science it helped to found.

Europe: proving the model at scale

Thomas Guillemaud (INRAE) presented Peer Community In (PCI) and the Peer Community Journal as a European demonstration that community-governed publishing can be rigorous, free and sustainable. PCI organises open, journal-independent review of preprints across twenty-one thematic communities, with recommended articles publishable, at no cost to authors or readers, in the Peer Community Journal, which is indexed in major databases. His challenge was less about infrastructure than about culture: the model works, integrity safeguards such as plagiarism checking are in place, yet submissions remain modest because researchers are still bound to journal prestige.

A shared conversation

The closing discussion, including reflections from the ALMASI team on training and mapping work, underlined the value of the comparison itself: Africa contributes a model of capacity building, Latin America a tradition of public infrastructure and critical vigilance, and Europe evidence that alternatives can operate at scale. Community-driven publishing, the session suggested, can be built between these regions.