Evolution and challenges of university presses of El Salvador in the democratization of knowledge

Abstract

Combining the academic scientific production of universities and open access is an inevitable path today, before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, the educational sector had already been equipping itself with the technology that the new generations of students demanded. But the year 2020 was the definitive push for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to make the leap to teach their classes 100 percent online, the pandemic came to change all forms of socializing and the education sector was not the exception. According to the history of university publishing houses, it began according to the Agreement for the creation of the State University Publishing House in 1958, later in 1975 the Editorial of the José Simeón Cañas Central American Catholic University (UCA) was created. At the end of the 90s and the beginning of the new century, other publishing commitments emerged from private universities such as the Evangelical University of El Salvador (UEES), Don Bosco University (UDB), Francisco Gavidia University (UFG), José Matías Delgado University (UJMD) , among other. They generally began with scientific-academic journals or research yearbooks in printed formats, which gradually became electronic journals, which step by step have been meeting the editorial criteria required by international indexing sites.
In addition, some publish specialty books, literary books and academic manuals, complying with legal requirements, physical structure and human resources, not only as an academic exercise of sporadic dissemination, but also visualizing internationalization and
democratization of what is generated through well-defined editorial processes.