CLACSO (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales / Latin American Council of Social Sciences) is not a commercial publisher in the usual sense. It is a non-profit academic consortium, created in 1967 through a UNESCO initiative and headquartered in Buenos Aires, that today brings together roughly 927 research centres and postgraduate programmes in 56 countries across Latin America, the Caribbean and beyond. Its publishing arm is one of the largest diamond open-access operations in the social sciences and humanities: everything it publishes is free to read, and authors are never charged.

This guide explains what CLACSO actually publishes, how its books and journals work, what "diamond OA" means in practice for you as an author, and how to cite CLACSO material correctly.

CLACSO's output is book-primary rather than journal-primary, which is unusual among the publishers you will meet in the social sciences.

• Books and collections. CLACSO's Librería Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Ciencias Sociales hosts around 1,800 CLACSO titles organised into roughly 50 collections, with a wider network catalogue the consortium describes as about 4,200 books. Well-known series include Grupos de Trabajo (working-group volumes), Coediciones with member centres and university presses, Antologías Esenciales, Clásicos Recuperados, Cuadernos del Pensamiento Crítico Latinoamericano and CLACSO-CALAS.
• The Biblioteca Virtual / institutional repository. Running since 1998, it provides open access to more than 160,000 full texts — book chapters, working papers, theses, conference papers and multimedia — produced by CLACSO's member centres.
• Journals. CLACSO publishes one journal of its own, Tramas y Redes, and co-operates the Portal de Revistas with Redalyc, which aggregates on the order of 1,060 peer-reviewed Ibero-American social-science and humanities journals and several hundred thousand articles.

Subject coverage is social sciences and humanities with a Latin American and Caribbean focus: inequality, labour, gender and feminisms, race and ethnicity, migration, education, health, urban rights, democracy, environmental crisis, geopolitics and critical theory. Working languages are Spanish and Portuguese, with some English and French titles.

CLACSO is a diamond open-access publisher: free for readers and free for authors. It has argued publicly, since at least its 2019 statement "Pagar por publicar no es el camino" ("Paying to publish is not the way"), that article processing charges shift the access barrier from readers to authors and disadvantage Latin American researchers.

Because there are no APCs, the usual apparatus of LMIC waivers, read-and-publish deals and transformative agreements simply does not apply. CLACSO titles are released under Creative Commons licences — non-commercial variants such as CC BY-NC-SA are common, but the licence is printed in each volume, so check the specific title before reusing material.

CLACSO's book programme is run through open calls and working-group processes, with academic coordinators and external evaluation; Tramas y Redes uses double-anonymised external peer review for all academic contributions. Editorial norms — length limits, structure, citation style, figure and table handling — are set out in CLACSO's manual de normas editoriales, and calls add their own requirements. CLACSO also applies gender-parity and regional-diversity criteria when composing volumes.

1. Find the right call. Most CLACSO publishing happens through convocatorias (calls) announced on clacso.org — working-group volumes, research competitions, co-publication programmes.
2. Check eligibility. Many calls are open only to researchers affiliated with a CLACSO member centre, so confirm your institution's status first.
3. Follow the normas editoriales. Use the manual's length, structure and referencing rules; APA and Chicago are the styles you will most often be asked for.
4. Submit through the named channel. Books go through the working group or co-publishing partner; Tramas y Redes goes through its OJS platform; repository deposits go through your centre's virtual library.
5. Expect a Spanish- or Portuguese-language process. Correspondence, evaluation and production are conducted in CLACSO's working languages.

CLACSO books and working papers are cited like any other book or report: author, year, title, "Buenos Aires: CLACSO" (adding the co-publisher when there is one), plus the DOI or repository handle. Many titles carry a biblioteca-repositorio.clacso.edu.ar handle — include it, since it is the stable location. APA and Chicago are the styles most commonly requested across CLACSO publications.

As a non-profit consortium funded by member fees and public and philanthropic grants, CLACSO carries no predatory-publishing risk: it charges authors nothing, its catalogue is fully open, and its titles are widely held in Latin American library systems and indexed through Redalyc. Reuse is governed by each title's Creative Commons licence; non-commercial and share-alike conditions are common, so commercial reuse or translation normally needs permission from CLACSO's publications area.