Editorial
SciELO in Perspective at Age 15 – Towards a new phase
This is the first issue of the biweekly newsletter SciELO in Perspective, which includes articles published on the same name blog – blog.scielo.org. The newsletter is a publication that was born with the aim of promoting the exchange of information, experience and knowledge on science communication. The intention is to share the advances of the SciELO Program and Network, with the celebration, in 2013, of 15 years of uninterrupted existence and operation toward the specific objective to contribute to the improvement and impact of the research published in national quality journals.
While completing 15 years, SciELO presents important results. It is one of the main programs of scientific communication in open access with a network of national collections that gathers 16 countries on three continents: 13 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal and South Africa.
In 2013, the SciELO Network indexes and publishes online more than a thousand journals, 900 of them active in certified national collections that meet SciELO standards. These same collections accumulate more than 400 thousand articles, which serve a daily average of over 1.5 million downloads.
However, SciELO still faces huge challenges in fulfilling its goal of achieving better quality and impact of the journals it indexes and publishes. Most of SciELO journals still have a long way to go regarding the state of the art, innovations and trends in international scientific publishing. To face these challenges, SciELO is prioritizing three lines of action during the next three years: the professionalization of journals’ editorial management and l operation, broaden the international insertion, and, the development of sustainable financing models.
In response to these challenges and lines of action, SciELO Program has been working steadily to expand its functions, in addition to indexing, publication and dissemination of journals, with the provision of common publishing services, marketing and dissemination. Such services are performed directly by SciELO, through the coordination of national collections or by mediation with national and international companies.
The prospect is that in the next two years most SciELO Network collections will provide common services, according to the state of the art to all its journals. SciELO projects itself, thus, as a metapublisher of independent journals, which follow the same methodology and technologies compatible to scientific publishing in open access.
The SciELO 15 Years Conference in October will serve as milestone and forum that shall reaffirm the goals of SciELO and the formalization of its new stage of development. The conference panels will have the participation of international specialists and leaders that will contribute to contextualize the analysis and discussion of the trends in contemporary science communication into the realm of emerging and developing countries and, in particular, of the SciELO Network. This framework and the forum will have greater impact with the proactive participation of representatives of national research and scientific communication funding institutions, publishers and editors, researchers, students and scientific communication professionals.
Editorial Team
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