SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a bibliographic database, digital library, and

cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals. SciELO was created to meet
the scientific communication needs of developing countries and provides an efficient way to
increase visibility and access to scientific literature [2] Originally established in Brazil in 1997,
today there are 16 countries in the SciELO network and its journal collections: Argentina, Bolivia,
Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, South
Africa, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela.[3]

SciELO

Producer FAPESP - BIREME (Brazil)

Languages English, Portuguese, Spanish

Access

Cost Free

Coverage

Disciplines Multidisciplinary

Record depth Index, abstract & full-text

Format coverage Academic journal articles

Geospatial coverage Latin America, Iberian Peninsula, South Africa

No. of records 573,525[1]

Links

Website

Title list

SciELO was initially supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) and the Brazilian
National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), along with the Latin
American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information (BIREME). SciELO provides a
portal that integrates and provides access to all of the SciELO network sites. Users can search
across all SciELO collections or limit by a single country collection, or browse by subject area,
publisher, or journal title.
Database and projects

By October 2015 the database contained:

1,249 journals

39,651 issues (journal numbers)

573,525 research articles

13,005,080 citations (sum of the number of items in each article's reference list)

from different countries, universally accessible for free open access, in full-text format.[4] The
SciELO Project's stated aims are to "envisage the development of a common methodology for
the preparation, storage, dissemination and evaluation of scientific literature in electronic
format." All journals are published by a special software suite which implements a scientific
electronic virtual library accessed via several mechanisms, including a table of titles in
alphabetic and subject list, subject and author indexes and a search engine.

History

Project's launch timeline:[5]

1997: Beginning of the development of SciELO as a FAPESP supported project in

partnership with BIREME.

1998: SciELO goes live.

1998: Chile's national research agency CONICYT asks to be considered as pilot project
outside of Brazil. [6]

1999-2000: Chile joined as regional collection, project supported by CONICYT.

2002: the CNPq also began its support for SciELO.

2005: Argentina joined as regional collection, project supported by CONICET

2009: South Africa joined as regional collection, project supported by ASSAf.

2012: the SciELO Books project is launched.

2013: the SciELO Citation Index is integrated into Thomson Reuters' Web of Knowledge
(WoS), covering about 650 journals total, 300 more than the 350 already in the WoS.[7]

2017 SciELO announced that they were setting up a preprints server – SciELO Preprints.[8]

Open access
In 2013 the Latin American SciELO project completed 15 years of free publishing.[9]Open access
has long emphasized access to scholarly materials. However, open access can also mean
access to the means of producing visible and recognized journals. This issue is particularly
important in developing and emergent countries,[10] where are other benefits of and challenges
for publishing scientific journals in and by emerging countries.[11]

Technology

Articles are sent to SciELO by publishers in XML or HTML+SGML, using a variety of article DTDs.
The SGML DTD was used until 2013, [12] when SciELO started to offer the Journal Article Tag
Suite (JATS) DTD standard for XML deposites.[13] Using to Markup XML a macro in a proprietary
desktop application (Microsoft Office Word - DOCX).[14]

In the SciELO portals, received JATS-articles are converted via XSLT to HTML, and "SGML+HTML
pack" articles use the HTML content (in general a handmade PDF-to-HTML conversion). This
process may reveal errors that are reported back to the publisher for correction. Graphics are
also converted to standard formats and sizes. The original and converted forms are archived.
The converted form is moved into a relational database, along with associated files for graphics,
multimedia, or other associated data. Many publishers also provide PDFs of their articles, and
these are made available without change.

Bibliographic citations are (SGML or XML) parsed and automatically linked to the associated
articles in SciELO and resources on publishers' Web sites. Unresolvable references, such as to
journals or particular articles not yet available at one of these sources, are tracked in the
database and automatically come "live" when the resources become available.

An in-house indexing system provides search capability.

Controversy

In July 2015, Jeffrey Beall, an American librarian, posted an article on his blog referring to the
two largest Latin American open access databases (SciELO and Redalyc) as "favelas",[15] which
is a derogatory Portuguese term for a slum. Beall stated:

"Many North American scholars have never even heard of these meta-
publishers or the journals they aggregate. Their content is largely hidden,
the neighborhood remote and unfamiliar."
Among the responses is a motion passed by the Brazilian Forum of Public Health Journals
Editors and the Associação Brasileira de Saúde Coletiva (Abrasco, Brazilian Public Health
Association).[16] The motion takes exception to Beall's characterization, draws attention to the
underlying "ethnocentric prejudice", and corrects factual inaccuracies. As a counterpoint to
Beall's "neocolonial point of view", the motion draws attention to work by Vessuri, Guedon and
Cetto emphasizing the value of initiatives such as SciELO and Redalyc (also targeted by Beall) to
the development of science in Latin America and globally: "In fact, Latin America is using the OA
publishing model to a far greater extent than any other region in the world…. Also, because the
sense of public mission remains strong among Latin American universities… these current
initiatives demonstrate that the region contributes more and more to the global knowledge
exchange while positioning research literature as a public good."[17]

See also

List of academic databases and search engines

PubMed Central (PMC)

Redalyc (similar project)

References

1. "SciELO" . Retrieved 19 October 2015.

2. Packer, Abel (October 2000). "SciELO - a Model for Cooperative Electronic Publishing in
Developing Countries" . D-Lib Magazine. Vol. 6 no. 10. ISSN 1082-9873 .

3. "SciELO.org - Scientific Electronic Library Online" . www.scielo.org. Retrieved 2015-10-19.

4. SciELO: SciELO in numbers . Accessed 27 June 2014.

5. The SciELO 15 Years Conference is a milestone in SciELO’s History. SciELO in Perspective.

[viewed 15 February 2014]. Available from scielo.org .

6. "Programa biblioteca cientifica electronica en linea, ScieELO-CHILE. Una nueva forma de

acceder a la literatura cientifica nacional" (in Spanish).

7. "Thomson Reuters Collaborates with SciELO to Showcase Emerging Research Centers

within Web of Knowledge" .

8. "SciELO Preprints on the way | SciELO in Perspective" . SciELO in Perspective. 2017-02-22.

Retrieved 2017-02-22.

9. Van Noorden, R. (2013). "Brazil fêtes open-access site". Nature. 502 (7472): 418.
Bibcode:2013Natur.502..418V . doi:10.1038/502418a . PMID 24153270 .
10. Packer, Abel L. The SciELO Open Access: A Gold Way from the South . Canadian Journal of
Higher Education Vol 39, No 3, 2009, pages 111–126

11. Meneghini, R. (2012). "Emerging journals" . EMBO Reports. 13 (2): 106–108.

doi:10.1038/embor.2011.252 . PMC 3271339 . PMID 22240975 .

12. Packer, Abel L.; Salgado, Eliana; Araujo, Javani; Aquino, Letícia; Almeida, Renata; Santos,
Jesner; Lucena, Suely; Soares, Caroline M. (4 April 2014). "Why XML?" . SciELO in
Perspective.

13. "Guia de uso de elementos e atributos XML para documentos que seguem a
implementação SciELO Publishing Schema. — documentação SciELO Publishing Schema
1.7" .

14. "Markup Program — SciELO PC Programs 4.0.094 documentation" .

15. Jeffrey Beall (30 July 2015). "Is SciELO a Publication Favela?" . Scholarly Open Access.
Archived from the original on 2016-11-08.

16. "Motion to repudiate Mr. Jeffrey Beall’s classist attack on SciELO ". SciELO in Perspective.
2 August 2015. Viewed 12 October 2015.

17. Vessuri, H.; Guedon, J.-C.; Cetto, A. M. (2013). "Excellence or quality? Impact of the current
competition regime on science and scientific publishing in Latin America and its
implications for development" (PDF). Current Sociology. 62 (5): 647–665.
doi:10.1177/0011392113512839 .

Further reading

Parker, Abel, ed. (2014). SciELO - 15 Years of Open Access: an analytic study of Open Access
and scholarly communication (in English, Spanish, and Portuguese). UNESCO.
doi:10.7476/9789230012373 . ISBN 9789230012373.

"SciELO Criteria: criteria, policy and procedures for admission and permanence of scientific
journals in the SciELO collection" . October 2004.

External links

Official website

SciELO South Africa

Last edited 23 days ago by Monkbot