Andréa Gonçalves, an Account Development Manager for Latin America at Springer Nature, has spent her career examining how scholarly research is published, distributed, and discovered. With a Ph.D. in information science and a background in library science, she specializes in scholarly communication, open science, information management, and citation metrics.

Brazil’s agreement with Springer Nature, negotiated through the federal agency CAPES, represents an ambitious effort to expand access to scientific research. Expected to make approximately 6,000 articles annually available through open access across more than 400 Brazilian institutions, the arrangement raises questions about who benefits from the growing movement to make academic publishing more accessible.

Eliminating publication fees, however, does not necessarily eliminate the inequalities that shape scientific research. Researchers at smaller or less well-funded institutions still confront disparities in resources, international networks, institutional support, and visibility. Meanwhile, critics of agreements involving major commercial publishers question whether they fundamentally change the economics of academic publishing or simply redistribute its costs.

In this conversation with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Gonçalves examines the promise and limitations of Brazil’s open-access initiative, the expanding responsibilities of research libraries, and the infrastructure needed to make scientific knowledge genuinely accessible. At the heart of the discussion is a larger question: Can opening the doors to academic publishing also create a more equitable global research system?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The CAPES–Springer Nature agreement is expected to make roughly 6,000 articles a year openly accessible across more than 400 Brazilian institutions. Beyond the number of articles published, what indicators would demonstrate that the agreement is genuinely democratizing scholarly communication?

Andréa Gonçalves: The success of the CAPES-Springer Nature agreement should be measured not only by the volume of articles published OA, but also by the breadth of institutional participation, creating opportunities for researchers across a highly diverse national research ecosystem rather than concentrating publishing opportunities among a small number of well-funded universities.

I would say the first measure will be growth in the number of OA articles published in Springer Nature’s hybrid journals, which is already being observed. Since the agreement does not impose a fixed cap on the number of eligible articles, we anticipate the total volume may exceed the expected figure in the first year, demonstrating both researcher demand for publishing OA and the capacity of national agreements to remove financial barriers to publication.

Another meaningful indicator of democratization is regional diversity. To date, articles have been published by institutions from all 23 participating Brazilian states, signaling that the benefits of OA are reaching researchers across different regions of the country. If this geographic diversity continues to expand alongside rising publication volumes, it will provide strong evidence that the agreement is helping make scholarly communication more inclusive, representative, and accessible in Brazil.

Jacobsen: Removing publication fees addresses one obstacle, but researchers still face stark differences in funding, institutional support, and international connections. Which inequalities are most likely to persist even when publishing becomes more affordable?

Gonçalves: Although access to publication is an important part of the equation, researchers still operate under very different conditions in terms of funding, infrastructure, access to data, technical support, and research time. Beyond local research capacity, meaningful participation in the scholarly communication ecosystem remains uneven, as structural inequalities continue to shape how scientific visibility and influence are generated, and researchers from many regions remain underrepresented in leading journals, citation databases, editorial boards, and peer-review networks.

Removing publication costs alone is therefore not sufficient to ensure broad participation in scholarly communication. However, open access agreements can create the conditions for a more geographically and institutionally diverse research landscape by lowering barriers to dissemination. Their long-term significance lies not only in increasing publication volume, but also in expanding opportunities for a wider range of institutions and researchers to contribute to the production, dissemination, and evaluation of knowledge.

Jacobsen: Critics argue that transformative agreements can expand open access while leaving the market power and underlying costs of major commercial publishers largely intact. What would constitute convincing evidence that these agreements are delivering a sustainable transition rather than merely shifting the costs?

Gonçalves: Transformative agreements will demonstrate a sustainable transition if they can expand open access without requiring substantial new investment from the research system. In practice, these agreements consolidate resources that institutions were already spending on subscriptions, integrating reading and publishing within a single framework.

We should also recognize that scholarly publishing depends on more than content dissemination. Publishers provide the infrastructure and expertise required for editorial management, peer review, discoverability, research integrity, long-term preservation, and the maintenance of the scholarly record. A sustainable transition must preserve these functions while broadening access to research outputs across institutions and disciplines, with transparent cost structures.

Jacobsen: As academic libraries devote more of their budgets to supporting open-access publication rather than purchasing subscriptions, how is their role within universities changing?

Gonçalves: The role of the research library is not being replaced, but expanded. Libraries continue to fulfill their longstanding mission of providing access to scholarly literature, managing collections, and supporting research and learning.

What is changing is that they are becoming more active participants in the publishing ecosystem itself, helping institutions navigate the transition from access-based models to open dissemination of research.

As more resources are directed toward open access publishing, libraries are increasingly positioned to advise researchers on how, where, and under what conditions to publish their work. This includes helping authors understand publishing options, comply with funder requirements, make effective use of open access agreements, and maximize the visibility and impact of their research.

In this sense, research libraries are evolving from content brokers into strategic partners in scholarly communication. Their value lies not only in facilitating access to knowledge, but also in supporting its creation, dissemination, and stewardship throughout the research lifecycle.

Jacobsen: Could that expanded responsibility eventually give librarians a greater say in negotiating, overseeing, and governing the infrastructure of scholarly communication?

Gonçalves: In many respects, this is already happening. Librarians have long been among the primary institutional stakeholders engaging with commercial publishers, managing subscriptions, licensing agreements, and access strategies on behalf of their research communities. They have also played a central role in developing and maintaining institutional repositories.

The growth of transformative agreements expands that role. As institutions invest in models that combine reading and publishing, librarians are increasingly involved in evaluating publishing outcomes, negotiating terms, monitoring costs, advising researchers, and assessing how these agreements support institutional research goals. This places them closer to the strategic governance of scholarly communication than at any previous point in the digital era.

Whether librarians become formal governors of scholarly communication infrastructure will depend on how institutions define leadership in this space. However, they are uniquely positioned to assume that responsibility, and transformative agreements present an opportunity for libraries not only to manage access to knowledge, but also to help shape the systems through which knowledge is disseminated and preserved.

Jacobsen: Brazil produces a substantial share of Latin America’s research, but its universities vary dramatically in resources and output. How can a national agreement ensure that smaller and less well-funded institutions benefit alongside the country’s leading research universities?

Gonçalves: One strength of the CAPES-Springer Nature agreement is its national scope. By covering more than 400 institutions under a single framework and removing article-level financial barriers, it creates opportunities for researchers regardless of their institution’s individual publishing budget. Early evidence of this broader reach can be seen in the geographic diversity of participating institutions, with articles already published by researchers from institutions across all 23 Brazilian states covered by the agreement.

Large universities will inevitably account for a greater share of publications because they produce a greater share of the country’s research. This reflects differences in research scale rather than unequal access to the agreement. The more meaningful measure is whether institutions of varying sizes and from different regions are able to participate according to their research output, rather than being excluded by funding limitations.

Jacobsen: Open science encompasses far more than journal articles, including preprints, datasets, software, and research methods. What would a genuinely connected and equitable open-research ecosystem look like in practice?

Gonçalves: A genuinely integrated open-research ecosystem should enable the responsible sharing and reuse of research outputs throughout the research lifecycle, including preprints, data, software, methods, protocols, and publications. Achieving this requires not only openness, but also policies, infrastructure, and clear incentives that support researchers in adopting open research practices.

Data is a good example. Making data available is only the first step; researchers and institutions also need the skills, support, and governance frameworks to manage, share, and reuse data effectively. Investment in training is therefore as important as investment in repositories and platforms. Without adequate support, the benefits of open science can remain concentrated among institutions with greater technical capacity.

Interoperability is equally critical. An effective open-research ecosystem should allow institutions and researchers to choose the systems that best meet their needs while ensuring that information can move seamlessly between them. This requires the widespread adoption of common standards and persistent identifiers, such as DOIs for research outputs, ORCID IDs for researchers, ROR identifiers for institutions, and metadata frameworks that support discovery and reuse across platforms. Open protocols and principles, including FAIR data practices, are essential to avoid fragmentation and maximize the value of shared research assets. In the long term, the success of open research will depend not on any single platform, but on the ability of diverse systems to operate within a connected, interoperable, and trusted global infrastructure.

Jacobsen: Making research free to read does not necessarily make it easy to find, reuse, or connect to the evidence behind it. Should the next phase of open access prioritize discoverability, interoperability, and reuse as much as access itself?

Gonçalves: The distinction is important because free-to-read content is not necessarily open access. Open access, as originally defined, includes not only the removal of price barriers but also the granting of permissions that allow content to be reused, shared, mined, and built upon. Licensing is therefore a critical component of openness. Without clear reuse rights, access may be wider, but many of the benefits associated with open scholarship remain limited.

At the same time, accessibility alone does not guarantee visibility. Research must be discoverable, linked to the underlying evidence, and integrated into the broader scholarly ecosystem. This depends on high-quality metadata, persistent identifiers, interoperable systems, and connections between publications, datasets, software, and other research outputs. Even then, discoverability is influenced by inclusion in major indexing and citation databases, which continue to play a significant role in determining what research is found, read, and cited.

For these reasons, the next stage of open scholarship should focus less on access as an end in itself and more on the broader and more equitable research infrastructure that enables knowledge to be discovered, connected, reused, and evaluated. The ultimate objective is not simply to make research available, but to ensure that it can effectively contribute to scientific progress by being visible, interoperable, and linked to the evidence on which it is based.

Jacobsen: Brazil already has an established tradition of open-access journals and institutional repositories. How can international publishing agreements raise the visibility of Brazilian scholarship without overshadowing that existing infrastructure?

Gonçalves: By removing financial barriers to publication, transformative agreements enable more Brazilian researchers to publish in widely read and internationally indexed journals. This helps address a persistent structural challenge in scholarly communication: the gap between producing high-quality research and achieving global visibility for that research.

For decades, Brazil – and other countries in Latin America – have supported a strong ecosystem of Open Access journals and institutional repositories, demonstrating a long-standing commitment to making research freely available.

Expanding participation in international OA publishing increases the likelihood that Brazilian scholarship will be read, cited, and incorporated into scientific debates beyond national and regional boundaries. Ultimately, the value of transformative agreements is not that they replace Brazil’s existing OA infrastructure, but that they complement it.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for your time, Andréa.