SciELO MarketPlace – commercialization platform for scholarly communication products and services

By Abel L Packer and Luis Gustavo S Gomes

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. It is one of the innovations that the SciELO Program is promoting on its 25^th Anniversary of regular operation.

The challenge of producing high-impact quality journals in the global flow of scholarly communication affects the ability of developing countries to operate the full cycle of making good science. There are many and well-known causes that isolated developing countries from the process that resulted in the formation of the so-called journal “mainstream” dominated by developed countries under the leadership of commercial publishers and scientific societies that commercially operate research communication.

The methodological and technological complexity that characterizes the production of quality journals has been progressively faced with increasingly sophisticated systems, first by paper publication and in the last three decades in the online digital medium. This evolution embodies forces that tend to increase the isolation of developing countries in having research communication infrastructures that complement the so-called “mainstream” and enable the complete cycle of making good science in most disciplines and thematic areas.

Taking advantage of the promising characteristics of the web as a research communication medium, SciELO was created and consolidated as a public policy to contribute to overcoming the exclusion of journals from developing countries through the renewal, expansion and continued strengthening of national research communication capacities and infrastructure centered on open access journal collections of increasing quality, aligned with the state of the art of scientific publishing.

In addition to the communication of basic and applied research aligned with the priorities, preferences, and relevance expressed by the so-called “mainstream”, SciELO, by means of its indexing policy centered on the diversity of topics and publication languages, started to promote through its journals of increasing quality national and regional centered research as an integral part of the global flow of scholarly communication. This strategy is carried out by SciELO as a meta publisher that ensures and promotes, on the one hand, the editorial independence of journals and, on the other hand, a common space of adherence to standards, best practices, and innovations to produce, preserve and disseminate research communication objects.

A global pioneer in the adoption of open access to scientific literature communicated by journals and more recently in the promotion in the countries of the SciELO Network of open science research communication, SciELO progresses by means of three priority lines of action: professionalization, internationalization, and operational and financial sustainability, that are permeated by the adoption of best open science practices. In addition to the policies of national science, technology, and innovation systems, research institutions and journals, the success of SciELO’s priority lines of action depends on the availability at accessible costs of qualified products and services dedicated to the flow of scientific publishing, such as the preparation of manuscripts, advanced and informed management of manuscript evaluation, structuring of texts in different digital formats (TXT, RTF, WORD, LaTeX, XML, HTML, PDF, and ePUB), language revision, bibliographic revision, translation, digital preservation , statistical methods, manuscripts review, etc.

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.

The conception, objectives and expected results of the SciELO MarketPlace operation form a methodological and technological solution for the convergence of supply and demand for products and services with the following characteristics:

• maximizing the visibility of products and services with a view to increasing sales and purchase transactions;
• easy operation through intuitive interface;
• operation agility;
• transaction security;
• recognition and appreciation of the best providers.

The implementation of SciELO MarketPlace will follow a process of progressive inclusion of new products and services providers that particularly respond to the demands of each countries’ National Coordination, journals, and authors of research communicated by the SciELO Network. As a background, we share below the result of the consultation on the level of agreement of the Editors-in-Chief of 294 journals of the SciELO Collection regarding the offer of different types of services of the SciELO MarketPlace, which was carried out in the first half of 2020.

Reference

PACKER, A.L., and MENEGHINI, R. Learning to communicate science in developing countries. Interciencia [online]. 2007, vol. 32, no. 9, pp. 643-647 [viewed 16 March 2023]. Available from: https://pesquisa.bvsalud.org/portal/resource/pt/lil-502727

Translated from the original in Portuguese by Lilian Nassi-Calò.