Open Access (OA) initiatives and knowledge infrastructure represent vital elements for both producing significant changes in scholarly communication and reducing limitations of access to the circulation of scientific knowledge in developing countries. The spreading of the OA movement in Latin America and Caribbean (LA&C) countries, exemplified by the growth of regional and national initiatives, such as the creation of OA digital journal libraries and the establishment of supportive governmental policies, provides evidence of the significant role OA is playing in improving the participation of LA&C countries in the so-called "global knowledge commons". In this paper, we map OA publications in LA&C countries through a bibliometric analysis of OA publications indexed by the Web of Science Core Collection and SciELO Citation Index during the period 2005-2017. Searches were done in the fields "Country", "Publication Year", "Language", and "Research Area" using WoS analytical tools, in order to map the evolution, distribution, and characteristics of OA publications in the LA&C region. The analysis is conducted on both the sub-regional and national levels. On the sub-regional level, trends in the four LA&C sub-regions (Southern Cone, Central America and Mexico, Andes, and the Caribbean) are identified and compared. On the national level, the analysis identifies as most representative and focuses on nine countries: Argentina,

The article aims at investigating the persistence and comeback of old media technologies (phenomena we define, in short, ‘retromedia’) by developing a distinctive theoretical approach named retromedia-in-practice and based on practice theory. Far from being abandoned and forgotten, many old media devices and artefacts (such as vinyl records, cassette tapes, analogue photographic cameras, early videogames and brick mobile phones, to mention just a few notable examples) are nowadays readopted by young generations and niche media subcultures. However, most of the existing literature focusing on these cases has limits and shortfalls, resulting in a partial and misleading understanding of these phenomena: scholars and theorists often put at the centre the cultural fascination for vintage objects and the nostalgia effect; other studies rely on a taken-for-granted distinction between old and new media; the relational and processual nature of media change is rarely addressed; and in general, research lacks a framework capable of adequately integrating symbolic processes with material and technological features. In order to cope with these shortfalls, the article adopts the approach of practice theory, which enables to focus not on the media themselves, but on the practices associated with them. After presenting the distinctive framework of analysis, we exemplify our approach by analysing three different cases coming from music (vinyl records), photography (Polaroid-like instant photography) and videogaming (the ‘consolization’ of old arcade games). These case studies rely on original empirical data coming from authors’ qualitative research. The article concludes by arguing that a shift from considering retromedia as objects or discourses to retromedia-in-practice allows to both address the processual nature of retromedia and propose an interpretation that keeps together media materiality, their meanings and also the embodied activities and behaviours that are attached to them.

The article addresses the issue of the digital divide in Ecuador and illustrates how artefacts from television material heritage might be transformed into digital libraries to provide marginalized communities with access to digital information. It describes an ongoing socio-technical project which aims at providing Ecuadorian rural communities with access to digital information through the re-functioning of analogue TV sets and other complementary technologies that will become obsolete due to Ecuador’s switch from an analogue to digital broadcasting signal. On one hand, the project is discussed with reference to the contemporary debate in the fields of Media and Television Studies on the obsolescence and renewal of technology; And on the other, it is discussed on the background of earlier projects focusing on the design of digital libraries to circulate information and improve digital literacy in rural contexts. Finally, the prototype created is discussed from a technical and conceptual point of view.

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