Researchers in Latin America face a series of common obstacles to access international scientific funding. We studied those barriers in a paper published in open access, first as a preprint and then as a peer-reviewed article in the journal PLOS ONE.
What We Studied
We used a mixed-methods design: a virtual focus group to analyze experiences in depth, and an open survey completed by 253 researchers from 16 countries in the region.
The most frequently mentioned barriers were the economic cost of national and international networking, the mismatch between eligibility criteria in funding calls and local career trajectories, the rhetorical differences in proposal writing, and a self-perceived lower competitiveness compared to peers from the Global North.
We identified that these are structural barriers, not isolated difficulties. Beyond the diagnosis, we propose strategies for funders pursuing broader Global South participation.
The Publication Process
We published the work in two stages, following Open Science practices.
In September 2025 we published a preprint in MetaArXiv, hosted by the Open Science Framework (OSF). This preprint is a complete version of the article, available to read and comment on before peer-review and without the editorial manuscript formatting. We also opened the data and analysis code on the same platform. We then submitted it to PLOS ONE, where it was peer-reviewed and accepted for open-access publication. From April 2026 onwards, anyone can read, cite, and reuse the contents of this article without paywalls.
Both versions are available:
How We Shared It
We accompanied each publication with short posts on social media, highlighting the main findings and acknowledging participants, with the link to the corresponding version. Some of them:
To summarize the results we also prepared an image carousel (in Spanish), covering the barriers and strategies in more accessible language:
Why We Share It
We want fewer barriers to transformative knowledge. Access to funding permeates the daily work of a large part of MetaDocencia’s research community. Studying the international funding landscape accessible from our region and publishing about it in open access is one of our ways to contribute evidence on a concrete problem.
You can find this and other works in our academic publications section.
Did you like this post? You can freely reuse it under a CC BY 4.0 license; you just need to cite it.
This is the recommended citation to use for reference: Jesica Formoso, Nicolas Palopoli, Laura Ación, Julián Buede (2026). Research Funding Barriers in Latin America: From Preprint to PLOS ONE. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21655805