Book launch: “We so loved Open Access” | SciELO 25 Years

Coordinator: Jan Velterop
Editor: Leila Posenato Garcia
Authors: Abel Packer; Peter Suber; Robert Kiley; Rob Terry; Ginny Barbour; Martin Paul Eve; Melissa Hagemann; Subbiah Arunachalam; Bernard Rentier; David Prosser; Hélène Bosc; Susan Veldsman; John Willinsky; Dominique Babini; Jan Velterop
Year: 2023
ISBN: 978-65-993452-6-5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21452/abec.2023.isbn.978-65-993452-6-5

 

Synopsis

The SciELO Program was created in the late 1990s when the idea of free access to scholarly content began to gain momentum, even before the term “open access” had been coined. At that time, access to academic publications was limited and costly, restricted to university libraries and the collections they subscribed to. With the emergence of the World Wide Web, electronic access to academic information became practically possible, allowing for wider and faster dissemination of scientific publications. However, the restricted access publishing system still dominated. In this book, the origins and evolution of the open access movement are explored from the perspective of individuals who actively participated. These pioneers of open access shared their experiences, successes, collaborations, and visions for the future on the occasion of SciELO’s 25th anniversary. The book pays tribute to their pioneering efforts and the crucial role played by SciELO in supporting open access and spotlighting regions of the world that were previously underrepresented in global academic communication. This celebration demonstrates how SciELO firmly placed these regions on the map of global academic communication and contributed to strengthening the open access movement throughout its successful journey. 

Table of Contents

Front Matter / Elementos Pré-textuais / Páginas Iniciales

Foreword 

The Journey of SciELO’s 25 years: reality beyond utopia and illusion

Fast and slow at the same time

Supporting Open Access for 20 years: Five issues that have slowed the transition to full and immediate OA

Research is born free but everywhere is in chains…. (apologies to Rousseau)

The power and importance of open access

“The guy who bangs on about open access”

Reflections on the Development of the Open Access Movement

Open Access in India: A long way to go and miles before we sleep 

Liège, a cradle of academic Open Access voluntarism

Publication Equity: a neglected aspect of open access?

My Open Access librarian’s story

Sivulile – “We are Open” – in South Africa

Reflections on twenty-five years of the Public Knowledge Project

The movement towards open access and open science in Latin America: the view from CLACSO

Open Access, an inevitable evolution to fit a fundamentally changed environment

 

Why preprint review is the way forward | Research Information

“However their growth in popularity has also highlighted a lack of systems of review around preprints that mean readers cannot easily assess the quality of new findings. This is the great opportunity for the future of research communication – bringing expert peer review and curation to the preprint literature.

A number of organisations are now doing just that, by embracing models that combine the speed and openness of preprints with expert peer review, full publication and curation. Some of them – eLife and Biophysics Colab, for example – are working with a shared vision in mind: a publishing ecosystem in which the significance of research is recognised on its own merits and independently of journal title. Some other models – including those used by PREreview and ASAPbio–SciELO Preprints crowd review – also take advantage of the open nature of preprints to enable researchers from groups traditionally underrepresented in science to participate in public review.

A few examples of these organisations and their respective models are described below. Together they represent significant community efforts to bring review and curation to preprints, and show how alternative models could work in a more open future for research….”

Event: Futuros a Libro Abierto: Trabajando juntos para construir infraestructuras de propiedad comunitaria para libros AA. 14 de julio, 2023 | SciELO 25 Años

Este seminario web presentará el trabajo del proyecto ‘Open Book Futures’ de COPIM, una colaboración internacional que construye diferentes tipos de infraestructura de propiedad comunitaria para desarrollar y fortalecer la publicación de libros de AA, y explorará cómo los miembros de la Red SciELO podrían participar y trabajar juntos con el equipo de COPIM para generar apoyo global para los libros de AA.

This webinar will introduce the work of COPIM’s ‘Open Book Futures’ project, an international collaboration building different types of community-owned infrastructure to develop and strengthen OA book publishing, and explore how members of the SciELO Network might engage and work together with the COPIM team to build global support for OA books.

SciELO webinar: Open Book Futures: Working together to Build Community-owned Infrastructures for OA books. July 14, 2023, 3.30pm (BST) | SciELO 25 Years

Over the last four years, the COPIM team have been developing open, community-governed infrastructure to support open access book publishing. This includes the Open Book Collective, which supports collective funding for OA books and infrastructures, and the Thoth metadata dissemination system, which enables publishers to easily create high-quality, open metadata to share their OA books as widely as possible. All of this infrastructure is community-owned and governed by its users. With £5.8 million from Arcadia and Research England to develop this infrastructure equitably as part of the ‘Open Book Futures’ project, the COPIM team want to find out how they can collaborate with, and learn from, the members of the SciELO network. How might what COPIM is building be useful to you? What are they currently missing? What are the possibilities for collaboration? Come along to this session, learn more about what COPIM is building, and share your perspective on how OA book publishing can best be nurtured and developed within SciELO and beyond.

 

SciELO MarketPlace – commercialization platform for scholarly communication products and services | March 16, 2023

In 2023, the SciELO Program launches the SciELO MarketPlace as a platform to promote the supply and demand of scholarly communication products and services compatible with the methodologies and technologies of the SciELO Publication Model, being projected as an important advance for the scholarly communication infrastructure in the countries of the SciELO Network. …

SciELO MarketPlace is an evolution of SciELO’s policy and procedures to certify companies from Brazil and abroad that are qualified in the provision of products and services in line with SciELO’s methodologies and standards for the production of journals and articles with more than ten years of experience. These companies decisively contributed to the improvement of SciELO journals and to the national research communication infrastructure. From these experiences, SciELO MarketPlace is projected as a notable advance based on an online platform initially in Portuguese and in the future multilingual that will bring together the competitive offer of a growing number of scholarly communication products and services and the informed purchase by well-defined mechanisms of selection and evaluation.

The SciELO Program will implement SciELO MarketPlace by means of the Fundação de Apoio à Universidade Federal de São Paulo (FapUNIFESP), responsible for the administrative and legal management of the SciELO Brazil Collection, in partnership with Bradoo, a company specialized in customizing services based on ERP Odoo, which is an Integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) that will provide reliability, maintenance and updating of its functionalities.

The MarketPlace is primarily intended to serve the research communication of the SciELO Network, but it will be accessible and publicly available to any user….”

SciELO – Brazil – OLIVA: La Producción Científica Indexada en América Latina. Diversidad Disciplinar, Colaboración Institucional y Multilingüismo en SciELO y Redalyc (1995-2018) OLIVA: La Producción Científica Indexada en América Latina. Diversidad Disciplinar, Colaboración Institucional y Multilingüismo en SciELO y Redalyc (1995-2018)

Abstract:  This article presents the results of the Latin American Observatory of eVAluation Indicators (OLIVA, its Spanish acronym) which aims to contribute to the visibility of indexed scientific output in Latin America and the Caribbean and enhance its value in evaluation systems. This study addresses the production published in open access by journals indexed in SciELO and Redalyc, based on a single database of a total of 1,720 journals (from 15 countries), 908,982 documents and 2,591,704 authors. It also highlights its disciplinary diversity, and trends in national and international research collaboration. Finally, only for the case of Brazil and SciELO, intranational collaboration is analyzed. The study concludes that there is a predominance of diamond journals, of university publishing institutions and of multiscalar forms of circulation. These characteristics, even with linguistic and disciplinary diversity, can contribute very effectively to the current needs of science communication in times of open science.

 

DOAB Highlights & PRISM Webinar

“The number of books added to DOAB in 2022 totaled an impressive 18,323. We were also very happy to have welcomed 87 new publishers last year. Currently, there are more than 65,000 peer-reviewed open access books in DOAB from over 600 publishers worldwide. Of those publishers, over 400 added at least one publication to DOAB in 2022. 

We are pleased to see so many new publishers joining from Latin America. Our collaboration with SciELO Books (a Trusted Platform of DOAB), resulted in an increased coverage in that area. We are very grateful to have SciELO Books as a partner, enabling us to onboard new publishers, keeping in mind the specific aspects of academic publishing in that area. With SciELO’s help we onboarded the following publishers in 2022: …”

SciELO 25 Años em São Paulo – 2023 | Registration | Sympla

“The SciELO 25 Years Week will bring together a series of events that will be designed as a global forum for face-to-face and online discussion on the state of the art and perspectives on the execution and communication of open science research and its contributions to the development of collections of research communication objects operated by SciELO with a focus on journals of increasing quality that the SciELO Network indexes, publishes, and interoperates. The evolution, current status, and future perspectives of the open science modus operandi, the importance of public policies, advancement of infrastructure and knowledge, characteristics for different thematic areas, different types of research, different operating models and contributions to research progress and its communication will be articulated in the agenda of the SciELO 25 Years Week in the dimensions of scientific impact, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (IDEIA).”

SciELO joins OA Switchboard with over 300 open access journals in the SciELO Brazil collection

SciELO Brazil is delighted to announce a partnership with the OA Switchboard making it much easier for research institutions and their libraries worldwide to be alerted to articles of affiliated authors in Brazilian open access journals and connect with their research. Integration between SciELO and the OA Switchboard is now in place, and SciELO Brazil has begun sending automated publication notification messages (so-called P1 messages), with article-level metadata.

Sciety welcomes ASAPbio–SciELO Preprints crowd review for the evaluation of Brazilian-Portuguese preprints | For the press | eLife

Sciety is pleased to announce the first non-English group to bring open review and curation to the platform: ASAPbio–SciELO Preprints crowd review. Based in Brazil, the group reviews preprints relating to infectious disease research that are posted on the SciELO Preprints server in Brazilian Portuguese.

A Ciência Aberta nas Humanidades | SciELO em Perspectiva

From Google’s English: “The scientific world has been undergoing a silent revolution. After centuries based on standards centered on the secrecy of laboratories and the anonymity of scientific evaluation, several disciplines are gradually migrating to what we call the Open Science Program (PCA). This involves a series of transparency policies that range from the availability of data used in research to the opening of opinions in the article evaluation process.

However, few still know about the impact of these transformations in the different areas of the Humanities, which bring together from fields such as Philosophy and History to Social and Human Sciences, such as Sociology and Psychology, passing through the areas of Applied Social Sciences, such as Administration, and Education. It was with the aim of monitoring this process and its main challenges that the SciELO Program held the event Open Science in the Humanities between the 17th and 18th of May. In total, there were six tables with more than two dozen editors and specialists discussing the consequences of the PCA for the area, its potentials and limits.

The first table was dedicated to the challenges of PCA in the Humanities. The director of the SciELO program, Abel Packer, and the deputy director of the Brazilian Association of Scientific Editors (ABEC), Lia Machado Fialho, presented data on the adherence of the Platform’s journals to open science practices. Despite being slow, the incorporation of these practices in the collection is not far from what happens in other areas. Furthermore, there is a whole plurality and creativity in this process, encouraged by the table as a whole. Finally, Professor Fernanda Beigel (University of Cuyo) highlighted the importance of considering regional and international inequalities in this process of spreading the PCA through the Humanities.”

SciELO Preprints server completes two years of operation, contributing to the advancement of Open Science | SciELO in Perspective

The positioning of the SciELO Program as an open science program, provided for the creation of a preprints’ server, announced in 2017. In September 2018, during the SciELO 20 Years Week, the partnership between SciELO and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) was launched with the objective of developing an open source preprints server based on the already consolidated Open Journal Systems (OJS).