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).

PKP and SciELO Announce Renewed Partnership

The Public Knowledge Project is honoured to announce that the leading international scholarly publishing platform SciELO has become PKP’s most recent Development Partner. The initial collaboration between the two organizations dates back to 2007. PKP and SciELO have both played vital roles in  supporting the growth and spread of open access publishing. They are global leaders in open infrastructure development and supporting open access publishing, with a rich history of working together internationally to advance open access to scholarly research. For example, journals using SciELO have provided PKP with a productive vein of detailed feedback for further improving its software to the benefit of users worldwide, while PKP has helped support key regional scholarly infrastructure developments worldwide. Commitment to this type of community-driven partnership demonstrates the power of collective action to transform scholarly publishing.

SciELO – Brazil – Desafios para a sustentabilidade dos periódicos científicos brasileiros e do Programa SciELO Desafios para a sustentabilidade dos periódicos científicos brasileiros e do Programa SciELO

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Latin America could become a world leader in non-commercial open science

“In the 1990s, new repositories and databases were born that would become pillars of a solid infrastructure for open-access scientific communication. With the launch of the open access journals databases Latindex, SciELO and Redalyc, the digitisation of scientific journals was given a boost and a quality seal was granted to published research. With a strong public imprint, these repositories acted as a springboard for the development of non-commercial open access environment that is today the hallmark of the region.

Latin America now has the optimal conditions to create open science infrastructure that capitalises on these previous efforts. And two examples stand out.

Brazil’s BrCris was developed by the Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia alongside major national public agencies. Brazil is an immense country, with a professionalised scientific and technological system that has produced many databases on a national scale, making integration a huge challenge. Examples include the Open Data Portal, the CV system Plataforma Lattes and the directory of research groups known as CNPQ….

The second case is that of the PerúCRIS platform. It was first devised when Peru approved its Open Access Law in 2013. The need then arose to integrate three scientific information platforms: the directory of researchers, the national directory of institutions and the national network of repositories. The new platform also includes all undergraduate and graduate theses….”

DOAB partners with SciELO to further enhance publisher discoverability and simplify workflows | Directory of Open Access Books

“DOAB, a central discovery service for open access books, is pleased to introduce a new partnership with SciELO. Through this new initiative, SciELO Books becomes part of a group of several trusted platforms to enhance the discoverability of open access books and create a more seamless process for publishers to list their open access books in DOAB….”

“No Publication Favelas! Latin America’s Vision for Open Access” by Monica Berger | ACRL 2021 presentation

by Monica Berger, CUNY New York City College of Technology

Abstract: Open access was intended to be the great equalizer but its promise has not come to fruition in many lower-income countries of the Global South. Under-resourcing is only one of the many reasons why these scholars and publishers are marginalized. In order to examine inequality in our global scholarly communications system, we can compare a negative and a positive outgrowth of this imbalance. Predatory publishing represents a a weak imitation of traditional, commercial journal publishing. In contrast, Latin America’s community-based, quality scholarly infrastructure is anti-colonial. It can be argued that Latin America’s publishing infrastructure represents one solution to predatory publishing. As the future of open access is debated, it is critical that we look to Latin America as we support new models that reject legacy commercial journal publishing and support bibliodiversity.

Jeffrey Beall infamously called Brazil’s SciELO a “publishing favela” or slum. Yet Latin America represents an important exception to the problem of underdevelopment of scholarly communications in the Global South. In order to begin to better understand the marginalization of the Global South and Latin America’s success, we need to unpack the history of open access, its overemphasis on the reader as opposed to the author, and how notions of development influenced its discourse. This focus on the reader is neo-Colonialist, positioning scholars from the Global South as “downloaders” and not “uploaders,” whose scholarship is peripheral.

Lacking alternative publishing options, predatory publishing, or amateurish, low quality publishing, exploited this gap. In its pathetic imitation of international, corporate publishing, predatory publishing is neo-Colonial and a form of “faux” open access where subaltern authors, editors, and publishers poorly imitate Global North corporate publishing. Predatory publishing is a sad simulacra with real world damage. Since predatory publishing is overwhelming based in the Global South and many of its authors based in the Global South, it tarnishes the reputation of all scholarship from less developed countries. In contrast, predatory authorship and publishing are rare in Latin America.

Latin America is an exemplar of sustainable and humane open access. Heather Morrison deemed Latin American as a “long-time peerless leader in open access.” The advent of Plan S, a rapid flip to open access, is accelerating the co-option of open access by large, commercial publishers predicating a variety of negative outcomes. In contrast, the Latin American concept of bibliodiversity represents an important alternative model. No one size fits all and a local vision governs. Bibliodiversity interrogates the presumption that all scholarship must be English-language. It also values indigenous and local knowledge as well as lay readers. Redalyc and SciELO include measures for research collaboration. Various regional scholarly organizations cooperate, sharing expertise, providing training in editorial and technical best practices. This cooperation has expanded to a global scale. The Confederation of Open Access Repositories and SPARC are partnering with LA Referencia and others, expanding Latin America’s vision globally, generating a meaningful alternative model for open access.

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Slides with talk transcript and sources as presented at the Association of College and Research Libraries conference, ACRL 2021: Ascending into an Open Future, held virtually, April 16, 2021.