Brazil is actively embracing Open Access to increase the visibility and impact of research whilst also addressing potential financial barriers that can emerge from stricter requirements.

We outline the history of Brazil’s mandates and its current policies for those looking to submit research or read it.

Open Access is the new paradigm

Open Access (OA) refers to a publishing model for scholarly research that makes information immediately available to readers at no cost. This research is also free to reuse for scholarly purposes.

The benefits of publishing Open Access include increased visibility of scientific work, which can lead to gaining more citations and a greater impact, reaching a wider audience, advancing scientific innovation, retaining copyrights, and increasing the potential for collaboration and recognition.

Open Access can also help institutions like universities and research agencies in low- and middle-income countries by removing any price barriers to accessing academic research.

History of Open Access in Brazil

There have been a range of initiatives and institutions that have worked to promote Open Access. Here is a brief history of Open Access in Brazil:

• 1998: The Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) was launched to support Open Access research communication. SciELO is a decentralised network of OA journals across 16 countries, developed based upon Brazil’s collection of journals.
• 2002: Supported by the Autonomous University of Mexico State and other institutions, Redalyc, a bibliographic database and digital library of OA journals across Latin America, was introduced.
• 2005: At the International Seminar on Open Access held in Salvador, Brazil, the first major statement on OA specific to the Global South was created: the Salvador Declaration. This urged governments to promote integrating developing countries’ scientific knowledge into the worldwide body of knowledge.
• 2007: The House of Representatives Bill n. 1120/2007 proposes that public universities make their research output Open Access.
• 2014: One of the country’s primary public health institutions, Fiocruz, adopted an Open Access policy.
• 2019: The Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), a taxpayer-funded grant and fund provider, mandated that all FAPESP-funded research must be made publicly available via institutional repositories.
• 2021: FAPESP mandate that all funded research must be made Open Access within 12 months.
• 2024: CAPES signs Read and Publish agreements with several publishers.
• 2025: The Brazil Action Plan 2023–2027 includes a focus on open data, promoting open science, and ensuring compliance.

Brazil has been ensuring that research results are openly available since before the term Open Access was coined. SciELO is a pioneering initiative and has increased the visibility of research in the region.

Current Open Access laws in Brazil

One of the leading agencies for funding scientific and technological research in the country, FAPESP, was the first government agency in Brazil to establish a policy on Open Access.

FAPESP has an annual budget equivalent to 1% of the state’s tax revenue and autonomy guaranteed by law. This supports vital research by granting scholarships and fellowships to projects in all areas of knowledge.

There has been a series of updates to FAPESP policy to ensure openness.

In 2017, FAPESP introduce the requirement to submit data management plans upon the submission of project proposals that outline how data will be used, generated, and made public. They encourage that all data be made FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). This was accompanied by a workforce to implement a network of open research data repositories.

The 2019 Open Access policy requires that all articles that result from FAPESP funding must be made publicly available in an institutional repository. Researchers are free to decide the venue for publication, as long as they comply with the policy.

Many Brazilian universities have institutional repositories; here are three examples:

• USP – University of São Paulo.
• UNICAMP – University of Campinas.
• UNESP – São Paulo State University.

This policy was updated in 2021, mandating that outputs must be made Open Access within 12 months of publication to enable the funder to verify compliance. FAPESP also encourages publishing through trusted repositories, as well as ensuring research has Creative Commons licensing and persistent identifiers.

Furthermore, many funding initiatives at FAPESP require that all software developed within a funded project be licensed as free software.

SciELO

SciELO was created using FAPESP funding. It is a digital collection of OA journals, edited by national scientific societies, professional associations, universities, and research institutions.

It contains more than 1200 OA journals, which collectively publish an average of 50,000 papers each year. In Brazil alone, SciELO contains nearly 300 journals that publish around 21,000 articles per year.

CAPES

The Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior (CAPES) is a federal government agency under the Ministry of Education, which is responsible for quality assurance in undergraduate and postgraduate institutions in Brazil.

It has 163 participating institutions and has the mission to ensure the work of Brazilian researchers is freely available to the global academic community.

It achieves this primarily by establishing Read and Publish agreements. These involve deals with scientific publishers, whereby CAPES pays the processing fees for publishing the outputs of Brazilian authors and also ensuring they have access to paywalled research.

Furthermore, the CAPES Portal de Periodicos is the largest digital archive in Latin America. In 2024, it was accessed more than 475 million times, and has a collection with hundreds of thousands of documents, such as books, periodical titles, repositories, and more.

The Portal serves 452 educational and research institutions and directly benefits more than 6 million students, professors, and researchers across all regions of the country.

IBICT

The Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia (IBICT) is part of the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation. It functions to promote the building of infrastructure for producing scientific and technological information.

It manages a range of important infrastructure for open science:

• IBICT Dataverse: A multidisciplinary repository for research data.
• Oasisbr: A multidisciplinary search engine for Open Access scientific publications and data.
• The Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations: A platform that integrates the information systems of theses and dissertations existing across 165 Brazilian teaching and research institutions.
• BrCris (Brazilian Current Research Information System): An aggregator platform for retrieving, certifying, and visualising data and information from across the research network in Brazil.

International initiatives

Brazil is an active participant in various international open science initiatives.

Many of these international collaborations support developing OA practices in Latin America to increase visibility and impact, alongside facilitating greater knowledge exchange among scientists and researchers globally.

Redalyc

Redalyc is a bibliographic database and a digital library of Open Access journals. It originated in 2002 with a focus on integrating scientific and editorial journals from Latin America into its index. It now exclusively integrates non-profit journals from any region.

As of March 2026, it features more than 750,000 articles from more than 1800 journals and has been highly important in increasing access to and the visibility of research in the region.

There are many Brazilian scientific journals indexed and hosted on the platform.

Red de Repositorios Latinoamericanos

The Latin American Repository Network portal was developed in 2006 by the University of Chile through its Directorate of Information Services and Libraries (SISIB).

It provides access to publications located in different repositories across Latin American countries.

It currently has more than 8,000,000 publications from more than 500 institutions in 21 countries. There are hundreds of institutional repositories from Brazil indexed on the platform.

Latindex

Latindex was developed in 1995 by UNAM and expanded to become a regional cooperation network in 1997.

It features a network of institutions that coordinate to gather and disseminate information on scientific publications produced in Latin America.

It actively disseminates, makes accessible, and improves the quality of academic journals published in the region. Of them, Brazil is a very active member and constitutes many of the participating institutions.

LA Referencia

The Latin American Network for Open Science, or simply LA Referencia, supports national Open Access strategies in Latin America and Spain. It provides interoperability standards and access to scientific articles and theses.

There are more than 100 universities and research institutions across 10 countries participating in the initiative. Brazil is a founding member, and Oasisbr represents the primary node feeding data from Brazil into the network.

Statistics for Open Access in Brazil

Brazil’s share of closed and Open Access publications has remained generally consistent from 2016–2024. Here are some statistics from Scopus:

• 2016: 47% of articles were subscription-only and 39% were gold Open Access.
• 2020: 46% of articles were subscription-only and 44% were gold Open Access.
• 2024: 51% of articles were subscription-only and 43% were gold Open Access.

Brazil is the 10^th biggest producer of research publications, therefore making its share of open publications represent a large body of research. Though the rate of subscription-only articles has increased to representing more than half of the total output, there are efforts to increase openness, such as the Read and Publish agreements established by CAPES.

Future trends

According to Abel Packer, Coordinator at SciELO, “there has been a shortage of science funding in Brazil in recent years”.

This may provide the impetus behind policies, such as those implemented by FAPESP, that mandate depositing research in open repositories whilst allowing researchers to choose their publication venue, so they are not restricted by financial barriers.

Furthermore, the CAPES agreements will massively increase access to research and options for publishing with large publishers based in the Global North.

Such polices and agreements compliment the efforts of organisations like IBICT that are creating infrastructure to enable researchers to openly share research results and data.

Overall, Brazil is increasing openness whilst being mindful of potential financial barriers that can emerge from stricter requirements. Strong and robust infrastructure is paired with coordinated efforts to increase visibility, reuse, and impact, all of which further solidify Brazil’s place as a leader in open science practice in Latin America and beyond.

Value of Open Access

All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an Open Access license. This means:

• Everyone has free and unlimited access to the full text of all articles published in MDPI journals.
• Everyone is free to reuse the published material if proper accreditation/citation of the original publication is given.
• Open Access publication is supported by the authors’ institutes or research funding agencies by payment of a comparatively low Article Processing Charge (APC) for accepted articles.

Researchers can satisfy Brazil’s developing Open Access policy and pre-empt any stricter legislation by publishing in an MDPI journal. Alternatively, if you want to publish an early version of your article, try Preprints.org, our service for publishing early versions of research that are not peer-reviewed and report on either ongoing or complete research.

Open Access makes vital information accessible to all readers and researchers and brings together scholars from across the world. Thus, it is ideal for tackling global challenges that require urgent and coordinated attention.

Brazil’s approach to Open Access infrastructure and policy is robust and comprehensive. Click here if you want to learn more about Open Access around the world.