The annual meeting of SciELO signals a new phase in the Program

By Abel L Packer

III Annual Meeting of SciELO, in 2012.

The new SciELO Brazil indexing criteria¹, the evolution of the performance of Brazilian journals and the responsibility of the editors in the improvement of the publications will be the major themes of the next annual meeting of the SciELO Program which will take place on December 2, 2014 at the FAPESP headquarters in São Paulo.

It has been a year since SciELO celebrated 15 years of regular operation with the holding of an international conference which analyzed the principal advances, trends and innovations in international scholarly communication, their impact and the challenges for the progress of journals from developing countries and emerging economies, especially those indexed by SciELO. Among the main challenges are the emergence of megajournals, the ease of publication and shorter evaluation times, and a greater appreciation of the journals from developing countries.

The SciELO Program outlined three principal lines of action which incorporate innovations and strengthening the ability of the journals to actively participate in the international flows of scholarly communication, and improve their performance. First, professionalization, which will result in the ability of publishers to publish journals using the state of the art in scholarly editing and publishing. Second, internationalization, which aims to increase the presence of the journals internationally. Third, financial sustainability, which aims to improve the financial sustainability of the journals.

These three converging action lines are being promoted and progressively implemented by SciELO in collaboration with journal publishers. The key result of this implementation is the development and regular operation of a platform of common products and services in scholarly editing and publishing covering all phases of the production of articles. These products and services will be available to all SciELO journals. Brazilian and international companies that provide these services are being certified by SciELO. The journal publishers will be able to contract one or more of these services, or assume the responsibility for the full production of articles by making use of the products certified by SciELO in the platform. The aim is provide SciELO journals with state-of-the-art publication systems at reduced costs.

However, the main goal is to improve the performance of the journals in the bibliographic indexes, using as a benchmarkthe citation counts obtained from the SciELO Citation Index in the Web of Science platform. The performance as measured by usage will be based on the number of downloads from the SciELO site according to COUNTER criteria. The performance in social networks will be measured by the altmetric.com service which registers the number of mentions articles receive in blogs and in the different information sharing services on the Web.

The progress in the lines of action will be monitored via groupings of journals grouped according to the major thematic area categories of CNPq. Thus, a list of requirements and a series of minimum indicator values will have to be complied with by the journals in each ofthe thematic areas. Another list will have to be complied with by all of the journals. These requirements and indicators are an integral part of the SciELO Indexing Criteria updated September 30, 2014 and which will be effective as of January 2015. A part of the requirements and indicators must be met by the end of 2015, and all by the end of 2016 as the implementation of the lines of action concludes and the SciELO Brazil collection of journals becomes fully compliant with the new indexing criteria.

Notwithstanding the efforts of the SciELO program, it is the institutions responsible for the journals and the editors-in-chief who have the primary responsibility to move forward with the adoption of the lines of action and therefore with compliance with the indexing requirements and indicators.

The 2014 annual meeting will be the principal forum for presenting and discussing the evolution of the performance of the SciELO journals and the new indexing criteria.

Note

¹ Critérios, política e procedimentos para a admissão e a permanência de periódicos científicos na Coleção SciELO Brasil – http://www.scielo.br/avaliacao/20141003NovosCriterios_SciELO_Brasil.pdf

Translated from the original in Portuguese by Nicholas Cop Consulting.