During the workshop, Congresswoman Ana Lilia Herrera Alzado, vice president of the Senate, said that an Open Access initiative can be a great first step in making science and technology more accessible to the people of Mexico.

Senator Juan Carlos Romero Hicks, Secretary of the Commission on Science and Technology of the Senate noted that while Mexico would require more training, human capital, funding, infrastructure, regional development, innovation to create more knowledge, it is also essential to ascertain freedom and Open Access to Scientific Knowledge creation processes.

Rep. Irazema Olivares Martínez González, Secretary of Science and Technology, Dr Enrique Cabrero Mendoza, Director of CONACYT, Dr Ana Maria Cetto Karmis, researcher at the Institute of Physics, UNAM, and other delegates also spoke at the workshop.

UNESCO, from its part, stressed the significance of Open Access to Scientific Research and noted that to build knowledge societies, opening up of knowledge creation and dissemination processes are fundamental.

UNESCO, through its Open Access Strategy, will backstop the efforts spearheaded by the Senate Committee, while CONACYT will provide policy development, policy implementation, capacity building, and monitoring and evaluation support. UNESCO will be supporting Open Access Policy Development efforts in Mexico to allow the easy flow of scientific knowledge by increasing its accessibility. This, in turn, shall help in innovation and socio-economic development.

Efforts are also ongoing to develop activities on Open Access in collaboration with Redalyc. 

Open Access is the immediate availability of works of scholars on the Internet for free – permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose.