in 2000 after incorporating ProBE, a Sao Paulo state-based program, initiated by a

consortium of university libraries (Almedia, Gumaraes, and Alves 2010). Over the
following years, CAPES struck deals with a wide range of content providers and the
number of full-text journals quickly increased.

As the cost of journal access has risen, the CAPES portal has become an increas-
ingly expensive program CAPES's journal budget went up from $2111 million in 2004

to $99.34 million in 2014.90 In the current economic crisis, rumors about the
demise of the program or a drastic reduction in the number of subscriptions, or
both, are frequent.
Brazilian universities, in any event, remain extrmely dependent on the CAPES por-
tal. For many it is the sole source of journal access. The institutions that have
the resourses to license other databases often lack proper legal assistance to
analyze licens-ing contracts. Libraries are often the weakest partner in a
negotiation that involves powerful companies like Elsevier, Thomon, and Pegasus,
resulting in nonnegotiable agreements surrounded by nondisclosure clauses. Another
concern is the ephemeral and impermanent nature of the access to these databases,
which can be easily terminated91.

And this, of course, is the dilemma. On the one hand, the CAPES portal is a funda-
mental resource for researchers in Brazil, providing free access, on a massive
scale, to thousands of proprietary journals and databases. On the other hand, it
also incenti-izes a model of scholarly publishing that is viewed as exploitative
by large portions of the academic community. This contradiction is well expressed
in the words of Bianca Amaro, an open access advocate and a lawyer at IBICT, " I'm
extremely in favor of the CAPES portal . The CAPES portal is invaluable to brazil
and will continue to be during many years, decades, I think, unfortunately ", Amaro
writes "But [it] should be reevaluated. What, effectively, are we buying? What
sort of power do we have [in the negotiations]? I suspect we're still and- even
more so after this internationalization project -hostage to these foreign
publishers."92

The internationalization project Amaro mentioned was an effort to bring inter-

national publishers to take control of top ranked Brazilian research. In other
words, CAPES would pay international publishers to take control of top-ranked
Brazilian open access journals, as a means to better position these publications
internationally.
The proposal was disclosed by CAPES at a meeting with sixty journal editors in
2014, and included presentations by Elsevier, Emerald, Springer, Wiley, and Taylor
& Fran-cis.93 The project received strong pushback from SciELO and the Brazilian
Association of Scientific Editors( ABEC, Associacao Brasileira De Editores
Cientificos), who argued that Brazilian, publishers had more than enough technical
capacity to produce journals with international reach, and that they should be the
beneficiaries of any publishing incentives.
This episodes is illustrative of the ambivalence surrounding CAPES's approach to
the dissemination of scholarly materials. The internationalizationproject was seen
as a