The SciELO (Scientifc Electronic Library Online) program celebrates 10 years of notable contributions for the improvement of the scientific research communication in Latin America.
The SciELO was implemented in the beginning of 1997 as a cooperative project between the Latin-American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information (BIREME/PAHO/WHO) and the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP). The first year was dedicated to developing a methodology to publish full-text journals on the Web, and the editors of ten Brazilian journals that comprised the first SciELO Brazil collection participated actively. The SciELO Brazil portal started operating publicly in 1998.
In 1998, the SciELO Chile collection also started its operation, which was coordinated by the Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (CONICYT). As from 2002, the project has also been supported by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico CNPq of Brazil. Promoted by the BIREME and supported by the CONICYT Chile, the SciELO progressively developed as a network of open access journal collections, extending its activities to the Caribbean countries, Portugal and Spain, using the same methodology to publish online journals and provide links in the internet, as well as to follow up the performance of individual articles, journals and collections.
SciELO today
In July 2007, the SciELO Network operates ten certified collections of online journals and there are six under development. As shown in table 1 (see annex), the national certified collections are from eight countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Portugal, Spain and Venezuela. The thematic collections include Public Health and Social Sciences English Edition. There are over 450 titles of certified journals and more than 130 thousand online full-text articles, including original scientific articles, review articles, editorials and other types of communication.
Table 1 – SciELO Network - collections status in July 2007
Certified Collections | Collections under development | ||||||
Collection | Start | Titles | Articles | Collection | Start | Titles | |
Argentina | 2004 | 29 | 2767 | Costa Rica | 2000 | 9 | |
Brazil | 1997 | 185 | 86253 | México | 2003 | 15 | |
Chile | 1998 | 66 | 15794 | Paraguay | 2007 | 2 | |
Colombia | 2004 | 38 | 1568 | Peru | 2004 | 21 | |
Cuba | 2001 | 20 | 7746 | Uruguay | 2005 | 6 | |
Portugal | 2004 | 15 | 902 | West Indian | 2006 | 1 | |
Venezuela | 2000 | 33 | 5123 | Total | 54 | ||
Spain | 2001 | 33 | 7604 | ||||
Public Health | 2000 | 10 | 9605 | ||||
Social Sciences | 2006 | 29 | 241 | ||||
Total | 458 | 137603 | |||||
The objectives established and the results expected by the original SciELO project to have been fully accomplished throughout its 10 years of operation. The initial goals are currently permanent objectives of the SciELO Program: to increase and maintain visibility, accessibility, quality, use and impact of scientific journals.
The performance indicators of the SciELO collection journals, including the increased use observed by a significant number of visits and downloads of articles; the trend to raise the impact factor of journals, both in the SciELO collection and in the ISI JCR; the higher number of submissions and rejections of articles; and more titles added to international indexes demonstrate the contribution given by the SciELO.
The collections SciELO Brazil and Chile are in an advanced stage and, in the first semester of 2007, had a monthly average of 8.8 and 2.1 million visits, respectively. In the Brazilian collection, the visits represented over 7.5 million downloads of articles and other texts. Most SciELO Brazil journals that are also indexed at the ISI JCR had a dramatic increase in number of citations received as well as in the impact factor. Simultaneously, in the last five years, three journals from the SciELO Chile collection and 10 of the SciELO Brazil collection have been indexed at the ISI Web of Sciences, SciELO represents one of the most important international initiatives in the open access movement. Moreover, it is certainly the most innovative development that brought greater impact to strengthening journals in Brazil and other Latin America countries.
By celebrating the 10th anniversary of the SciELO Network, FAPESP, CNPq and BIREME reassure their commitment to cooperative networking, acting together with national institutions that support research and scientific communication, besides publishers of Iberian American journals, as the main strategy to increase the operational capacity and critical mass of the SciELO. They also show their commitment to open access publishing in order to increase and guarantee visibility, accessibility, quality, use and impact of the SciELO collection journals.
More about the SciELO:
PACKER, Abel Laerte; BIOJONE, Mariana Rocha; ANTONIO, Irati; et al. SciELO: uma metodologia para publicação eletrônica. Ciência da Informação [online]. 1998, vol. 27, no. 2. Available at
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0100-19651998000200002&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=pt. ISSN 0100-1965.
ANTONIO, Irati; PACKER, Abel. Seminário sobre Avaliação da Produção Científica: Relatório Final. Ciência da Informação [online]. 1998, vol. 27, no. 2. Available at http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0100-19651998000200023&lng=pt&nrm=iso. ISSN 0100-1965.
PRAT, Anna Maria. The evaluation of the scientific literature as a tool for the development of science and techonology. Ci. Inf. [online]. 1998, vol. 27, no. 2 [citado 2007-08-06]. Available at http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0100-19651998000200015&lng=es&nrm=iso. ISSN 0100-1965.
PRAT, Anna Maria. Programa Biblioteca Científica Electrónica en Linea, SciELO-Chile: una nueva forma de acceder a la literatura cientifica nacional. Biological Research [online]. 2000, vol. 33, no. 2. Available at http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0716-97602000000200003&lng=es&nrm=iso. ISSN 0716-9760.
MENEGHINI, Rogerio. O projeto Scielo (Scientific Electronic Library on Line) e a visibilidade da literatura científica "Periférica". Quím. Nova [online]. 2003, vol. 26, no. 2 [cited 2007-08-06], pp. 155-156. Available format http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0100-40422003000200001&lng=en&nrm=iso. ISSN 0100-4042.
PACKER, Abel Laerte. The SciELO Model for electronic publishing and measuring of usage and impact of Latin American and Caribbean scientific journals. In ICSU-UNESCO International Conference: Electronic Publishing in Science, 2 [online]. Paris, 2001, pp. 19-23. Available at http://eos.wdcb.ru/eps2/eps02016/eps02016.pdf.
PACKER, Abel L.; PRAT, Ana María; LUCCISANO, Adriana; MONTANARI, Fabiana; SANTOS, Solange; MENGHINI, Rogério. El modelo SciELO de publicación científica de calidad en acceso abierto. [pdf]. [Argentina]: 2006. Available at http://bibliotecavirtual.clacso.org.ar/ar/libros/secret/babini/Parcker%20Part%20Lucisano.pdf. ISBN:
987-1183-53-4.
Meneghini Rogerio, Mugnaini Rogerio, Packer Abel L. International versus national oriented Brazilian scientific journals. A scientometrics analysis based on SciELO and JCR-ISI databases. Scientometrics 2006; 69(3): 529-38.