  We study the national production of academic knowledge in all Iberoamerican
countries (IAC) between 1973 and 2007. We show that the total number of
mainstream scientific publications listed in SCI,SSCI and A&HCI follows an
exponential growth, the same as the national productivity expressed in the
number of publications per capita. We also explore the temporal evolution of
the co-authorship patterns between a sample of 12 IAC responsible for 98% of
the total regional publications, with a group of other 45 nations. We show that
the scientific co-authorship among countries follows a power-law and behaves as
a self-organizing scale-free network, where each country appears as a node and
each co-publication as a link. We develop a mathematical model to study the
temporal evolution of co-authorship networks, based on a preferential
attachment strategy and we show that the number of co-publications among
countries growths quadraticly against time. We empirically determine the
quadratic growth constants for 352 different networks within. We corroborate
that the connectivity of regional countries with larger scientific networks is
growing faster than with other less connected countries. We determine the
dates, at which the co-authorship connectivities trigger the self-organizing
scale free network for each of the 352 cases. We find that the last follows a
normal distribution around year 1981.4 +/-2.2 and we connect the last effect
with a brain-drainage process generated in the region. We show how the number
of co-publications Pki (t) between country k and country i, is related with a
power-law against the coupling growth coefficients aki.
