Abstract

In this conversation, which took place in Havana in October 2010, Pedro Urra González recounts the creation of Cuba's Sistema Nacional de Información en Ciencias de la Salud (National Information System in Health Sciences) during the 1960s and the founding of the Infomed project in the beginning of the 1990s. He describes the epistemological frameworks which supported the development of Infomed as a cultural and social process and as a place of confluence of different types of thought, based on a theory of knowledge oriented to respond to the needs of practice and transformation. Grounding himself in a conception of information systems as human, social and historical constructions which cannot be treated as artifacts disconnected from the reality that embeds them, he analyzes bibliometric indicators, the Open Access movement and such regional projects as the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) and the Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y el Caribe, España y Portugal (Redalyc).