SciELO 25 Years: Open Science with IDEIA – Impact, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility

By Abel L Packer, Luis G S Gomes, Alex Mendonça, Denise Peres, Amanda Ramalho, Rondineli Gama Saad, Solange Santos, and Roberta Takenaka

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 organization of the SciELO 25 Years Week will follow the same structure as the week that celebrated the 20 years: the first two days will host the Meeting of the SciELO Network and thematic Working Groups (WGs) dedicated to the analysis of critical issues for the improvement of the Open Science SciELO Publishing Model (Portuguese only), followed by a three-day conference dedicated to the international state of the art of the open science modus operandi.

The first two days will be exclusively face-to-face, and the international conference will be face-to-face and online.

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).

Meeting of the SciELO Network and Thematic Working Groups

The SciELO Program is developed as an open science infrastructure program in accordance with the state of the art and is structured as a framework for the formulation, implementation and evaluation of public policies for research communication with an emphasis on the development of knowledge and infrastructure according to national conditions and priorities. Its implementation is carried out through an integrated set of policies, procedures, methodologies, and technologies named the SciELO Publishing Model.

The decentralized implementation of the SciELO Program through the SciELO Publishing Model makes up the SciELO Network, which in 2022 is present in 17 countries, covers around 1,300 active journals that publish more than 60,000 articles per year and accumulates a repository of more than 1 .1 million documents. The SciELO Network serves a daily average of more than 1.5 million unique accesses to articles.

The SciELO Network Meeting

The SciELO Network Meeting, which takes place every five years, will have the participation of the national coordinators of the collections of the 17 countries of the SciELO Network: 14 from Latin America and the Caribbean, South Africa, Spain, and Portugal.

As in previous meetings, the agenda of the SciELO Network Meeting will focus on two main topics related to the management and decentralized operation of the network, which prioritizes the development of national capacities and infrastructures according to public policies to support research and its communication, conditions, and national priorities.

The first topic is the assessment of the national progress of the SciELO Program as an open science program with the support of a common analysis instrument based on the SWOT methodology, which maps the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats considering the dimensions of policy, management and operation, operational and financial sustainability, methodological and technological updating, visibility, and impact.

The second topic is the updating of the priority lines of action for professionalization, internationalization and operational and financial sustainability focused on the transition to the open science modus operandi that aims at the continuous improvement of research and its visibility and impact with the promotion and ubiquitous adoption of contexts and practices that strive for transparency, cooperation, quality, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

Thematic Working Groups

In parallel with the Network Meeting, a set of Working Groups will analyze critical issues of the open science modus operandi and its contribution to the renewal and improvement of the SciELO Program and the SciELO Publishing Model. The WGs will be formed by journal editors and scholarly communication researchers.

The agendas of the thematic WGs will address the alignment of the journal editorial policies and management models with open science practices. SciELO considers journals as orchestrating instances of research communication processes and objects in the open science modus operandi, with an emphasis on research documents and data and on the openness of processes and decisions.

The classic types of documents (research articles, review articles, case studies, essays etc.) are enriched with new types such as data papers, research assessment reviews and others. Research data encompasses all the contents underlying the documents that communicate research and that inform the processes of assessment, replication, reproduction and reuse of methodologies and research.

Open science assumes openness in the processes of evaluation, editing, and curation of research communication objects, and journals play an essential role in promoting credibility and transparency.

The SciELO Publishing Model promotes the evolution of journals through the management of communication objects in web library collections, with the functions of storage and digital preservation, publication, dissemination, interoperability, and performance measure in a context of universalization, disintermediation, and virtualization.

Thus, the model operates national journal collections (SciELO Argentina, SciELO Bolívia, SciELO Brasil, SciELO Chile, SciELO Colombia, SciELO Costa Rica, SciELO Cuba, SciELO Ecuador, SciELO México, SciELO Paraguay, SciELO Peru, SciELO Portugal, SciELO South Africa, SciELO España, SciELO Uruguay, SciELO Venezuela e SciELO West Indies), the SciELO Preprints server, the SciELO Data repository, and the SciELO Books collection.

Each type of web collection or library encloses its own dynamics of policies and procedures, methodologies, and technologies that demand more qualified human resources and even more sophisticated operational infrastructures.

Thus, the alignment with open science practices expanded SciELO’s functionalities related to indexing, storage, and digital preservation, publishing, communication, interoperability, and monitoring of the articles and research data performance, of the research evaluation processes and of the production of articles and media and research dissemination. It also reflects on greater transparency and openness of the processes of evaluation and production of articles and research data.

The WGs will primarily address issues in which the adoption of open science practices impacts and renews editorial policies and journal management, as the update of the SciELO Open Science Publishing Model enriches journals with orchestrating functions for the different research communication objects.

International Conference

The international conference is organized by the SciELO Program every five years with a main objective of updating and energizing the Program and its Publishing Model in line with the state of the art in open access research communication, now in the open science modus operandi. It also aims at strengthening the global insertion of the research communicated by SciELO journals in a proactive way to increase its visibility and impact and contribute to expanding the diversity and inclusion of research objects in the global flow of communication in geographic, thematic, and linguistic terms and meeting local, regional, and global priorities.

The open science modus operandi makes it possible to carry out, inform and communicate research through contents organized as formal objects of research communication, such as the documents and research data underlying the texts of the documents that make it possible to provide increasing transparency to the evaluation, structuring, editing, and curation processes.

The open science modus operandi, on the one hand, affects and requires the proactive participation of all instances and actors and, on the other hand, improves the functions that make up the scientific communication enterprise. This conceptualization of the dynamic structure that promotes and consolidates the advancement of open science practices will organize the International Conference’s agenda in a matrix of panel identification, with a dimension formed by the actors and instances and another by the research communication functions.

The most relevant actors and instances in the promotion and implementation of open science are: (i) governmental and institutional authorities, societies, associations, and movements related to the management, execution, and communication of research; (ii) publishers, journal editors, and authors related to the production and availability of research communication objects; and (iii) indices and services for controlling, preserving, transforming, monitoring, and measuring the performance of scientific outputs. The most relevant functions in the communication of research are: (a) public and institutional policies in favor of the advancement of open science practices that, on the one hand, face resistance and misunderstandings and, on the other hand, present success stories; (b) the enrichment of scientific output and its performance in terms of visibility and academic impact in favor of research advancement; (c) the contribution of scientific output in terms of visibility and impact beyond the academic environment in cultural, social, economic, and technological dimensions; and (d) the incorporation of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the design, execution, communication, and research impact assessment of. The matrix of the intersection of actors and research communication functions will result in a programmatic agenda of 12 panels.

The construction of the panels’ agenda, including the scope and participants of each of the panels, will be conducted through the lines of research communication functions. Each function will have a scientific committee formed by one or more representatives of the actors and bodies responsible for promoting research in open science mode and one or more representatives of the SciELO Program. There will be four scientific committees, each formed by five or more researchers or scholarly communication professionals.

Challenges

The organization of the SciELO 25 Years Week represents a major challenge in current times, after the COVID-19 pandemic, characterized by economic crises and reduced support for research programs in many countries.

The decision to hold the Meeting of the Network and the WGs in person aims at maximizing the dialogue and deepening of the issues that are critical for the advancement and consolidation of the SciELO Publishing Model in the open science modus operandi. At the same time, the decision to hold the International Conference simultaneously in person and online seeks to maximize the advantages of each mode.

Beside the experiences, lessons learned and good practices from other events in terms of sharing scientific and technical knowledge, deepening dialogue on critical issues, the SciELO 25 Years Week is motivated and strengthened by the principles of the SciELO Program in terms of operating in a network at all levels and promoting and consolidating environments, processes, products, and services that are developed with diversity, inclusion, equity, and accessibility. Historically, these principles have endowed SciELO with remarkable resilience in adopting innovations without disrupting the advances already achieved and democratic and systemic construction of new levels of excellence in the improvement of journals and the research they communicate.

Following the SciELO principles, the organization and realization of the SciELO 25 Years Week will rely on the participation and support of the different instances of promotion of research and its communication and with leaders committed to the advancement of open science practices.

Organization

The organization of the SciELO 25 Week will be led by the following working groups directed by the area coordinators of the SciELO Brazil Collection:

• Scientific Committees – Coordination and Secretariat – Abel L Packer, Solange Santos, and Denise Peres
• SciELO Network – Solange Santos and Abel L Packer
• SciELO Books – Amanda Ramalho and Abel L Packer
• Systems – Roberta Takenaka and Rondineli Gama Saad
• Marketing – Alex Mendonça and Amanda Ramalho
• Finances – Luis Gustavo S. Gomes
• Infrastructure – Luis Gustavo S. Gomes and Rondineli Gama Saad
• Event Call Center – Alex Mendonça, Amanda Ramalho, and Denise Peres

External link

SciELO 25 Years: https://25.scielo.org/en