This observation was written by Caroline Winter, with thanks to Juan Pablo Alperin and Bernardo Bueno for their feedback and contributions.
At a glance:
| Title | The PKP and SciELO’s Renewed Partnership |
| Creator | The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) |
| Publication Date | December 2021 |
| Keywords | open access, INKE partner activities, scholarly communication |
In December 2021, The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) announced its newest development partner: Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO). In renewing this collaborative relationship between the two organizations that dates to 2007, SciELO joins the PKP’s other development partners.
The PKP is an open source software research and development initiative founded in 1998 by John Willinsky at the University of British Columbia and currently based at Simon Fraser University. Its software includes Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Monograph Press (OMP), and Open Preprint Systems (OPS). SciELO is the first member of PKP’s Advisory Committee based outside of Europe and North America.
SciELO
SciELO is an international database and digital library of open access (OA) journals in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain. It was founded in Brazil in 1998 to meet the needs of researchers in developing countries, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean. It follows three principles: regarding research as a public good and adopting the gold route of open access, using a decentralized network model for creating economies of scale and maximizing the visibility of its research, and keeping up to date with technical and other innovations in scholarly communications (SciELO 2021).
SciELO acts as a “meta-publisher,” providing a publishing infrastructure as well as “common principles, objectives, rules, processes, and technologies” to the journals it publishes, resulting in an overall increase in the quality of the OA research produced (Packer 2009, 117).
The SciELO journals network now includes 15 regional collections (with two more in development), each managed by a national research organization, as well as two thematic collections. It also includes SciELO Books, a collection of nearly 1000 open access scholarly books that celebrated its tenth anniversary in March 2022. In a precursor to the development partnership, in 2018, SciELO and PKP announced they were collaborating to develop SciELO Preprints, which was launched in 2020. Also launched in 2020 was SciELO Data, a repository for research data from SciELO journal or preprint articles.
SciELO’s network follows the gold route to OA, but with a focus on covering the costs of publication only and minimizing these through economies of scale (Packer 2009). It receives some grant funding from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), but each national partner funds its own collections’ publication costs.
By increasing visibility, access, and quality, SciELO also enhances research impact. SciELO journals are indexed in various bibliographic databases, which increases their findability, and all are open access and licensed through Creative Commons. It uses persistent identifiers, including DOIs for articles and ORCID IDs for authors (see “The UK Persistent Identifier (PID) Consortium” and “ORCID: Connecting Research and Researchers”), and has an Analytics dashboard in beta and conducts periodic analysis of altmetric data (SciELO 2021; see “Altmetrics for Research Evaluation”).
SciELO and the INKE Partnership
SciELO has ties to the INKE community through this renewed partnership with PKP. It also joins another INKE partner, Érudit, in the Global Alliance of Open Access scholarly Communication Platforms (GLOALL), a UNESCO initiative launched in 2019 to recognize the importance of open scholarship for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. GLOALL also includes African Journals Online (AJOL), AmeliCA, J-Stage, and OpenEdition.
Responses from the Broader Community
SciELO is widely regarded as a leader in the Open Scholarship movement and a model for open access and sustainable, not-for-profit, collaborative publishing. Tennant et al. write, for example, that SciELO “has proven unequivocally successful across Latin America, Portugal, and South Africa,” an example of the “geographical heterogeneity” that they cite as one of the strengths of the Open Scholarship movement (2019).
Similarly, the Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) lists SciELO alongside the Budapest Open Access Initiative, OA2020, SPARC, and other influential international initiatives and organizations as one of the “prominent players” in the Open Scholarship movement (“OSI” 2018). The OSI also highlights the significance of “the brilliant” SciELO in its Open Science Roadmap Recommendations to UNESCO, noting that its “origins actually predate the open movement but [it] is constantly updating itself to stay robust and cutting edge” (Hampson et al. 2020, 38).
SciELO’s Partnership with PKP and Open Scholarship
Latin America is a global leader in open access scholarship (Alperin 2019; Colodrón 2018). A study examining OA performance at the institutional level, for instance, describes the “high performance” of many Latin American, African, and some Indonesian universities as “striking” and attributes this success to institutional leadership and infrastructures—including SciELO—that support OA publishing (Huang et al. 2020; see Ross 2020).
SciELO’s strategic plan focuses strongly on open scholarship and includes increasing its capacity for depositing preprints, continuous publication, reference management (following the Center for Open Science’s Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines), and open and transparent peer review (SciELO 2021). It provides a model for understanding scholarly communication as a public good (Bulock 2019).
Because SciELO networks publish research in Portuguese, Afrikaner, French, English, Dutch, Catalan, Spanish, Russian, Galego, and more, it plays an important role in promoting multilingualism in scholarly communication and bibliodiversity (see Shearer et al. 2020). SciELO supports scholarship with a local and regional focus, aligning with its mandate to support and enable OA in developing countries, following the principles of the Salvador Declaration (Packer 2009). The announcement about the collaboration between PKP and SciELO emphasizes that “both organizations share a common vision of a collaboration dedicated to extending the Latin American ability to publish in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as English. This is a critical aspect for both SciELO and PKP in their efforts to promote a global knowledge exchange.” (PKP 2021).
In a keynote talk for the 2019 United Nations Open Science Conference in which he connects open scholarship to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, the PKP’s Juan Pablo Alperin points to the fact that open access innovation places Latin American researchers at a disadvantage in a global context because many existing OA policies, such as Plan S, either support or facilitate gold routes to OA that do rely on APCs (see “Plan S and cOAlition S”). Alperin explains that,
“when a researcher from the Global North submits to a journal from Latin America, Latin American universities and governments cover the costs of its public availability, but when a researcher from Latin America submits to a journal in the Global North, it is again Latin American governments that need to send money to the North” (2019).
Alperin points to a widespread challenge for open scholarship: ensuring that strategies for making scholarship more open work as intended, increasing rather than decreasing inclusivity and accessibility (see Kowaltowski et al., 2022).
The renewed partnership between PKP and SciELO recognizes the need for open scholarship policy to be considered in the context of the global scholarly communications ecosystem.
Works Cited
Alperin, Juan Pablo. 2019. “Policies and Incentives for Open Scholarly Communication.” ScholCommLab. December 19, 2019. https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2019/12/19/osun-keynote/.
Bulock, Chris. 2019. “Open Dialog: SciELO’s Approach to Open Access Publishing.” Serials Review 45 (4): 245–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2019.1690931.
Colodrón, Victoriano. 2018. “Why Open Access Publishing Is Growing in Latin America.” Times Higher Education (THE) (blog). June 19, 2018. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/why-open-access-publishing-growing-latin-america.
Hampson, Glenn, Mel DeSart, Jason Steinhauer, Elizabeth Gadd, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Michael Vandegrift, Chris Erdmann, and Rob Johnson. 2020. “Open Science Roadmap.” OSI Policy Perspectives. Open Scholarship Initiative. https://journals.gmu.edu/index.php/osi/article/view/2735.
Huang, Chun-Kai (Karl), Cameron Neylon, Richard Hosking, Lucy Montgomery, Katie S Wilson, Alkim Ozaygen, and Chloe Brookes-Kenworthy. 2020. “Evaluating the Impact of Open Access Policies on Research Institutions.” ELife 9 (September): e57067. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.57067.
Kowaltowski, Alicia, Michel Naslavsky, and Mayana Zatz. 2022. “Open Access Is Closed to Middle-Income Countries.” Times Higher Education (THE), April 14, 2022. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/open-access-closed-middle-income-countries.
“OSI Brief: What Do We Mean by ‘Open’?” 2018. OSI Global (blog). November 15, 2018. https://osiglobal.org/2018/11/15/osi-brief-what-do-we-mean-by-open/.
Packer, Abel L. 2009. “The SciELO Open Access: A Gold Way from the South.” Canadian Journal of Higher Education / Revue Canadienne d’enseignement Supérieur 39 (3): 111–26 https://doi.org/10.47678/cjhe.v39i3.479.
PKP (Public Knowledge Project). 2021. “PKP and SciELO Announce Renewed Partnership.” Public Knowledge Project (blog). December 21, 2021. https://pkp.sfu.ca/2021/12/21/1459967/.
Ross, John. 2020. “Open Access ‘Top Performers’ in Africa and Latin America.” Times Higher Education, October 24, 2020. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/open-access-top-performers-africa-and-latin-america.
SciELO. 2021. “SciELO – Priority Lines of Action 2019–2023.” https://wp.scielo.org/wp-content/uploads/priority-lines-action-2019-2023.pdf.
Shearer, Kathleen, Leslie Chan, Iryna Kuchma, and Pierre Mounier. 2020. Fostering Bibliodiversity in Scholarly Communications: A Call for Action. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3752923.
Tennant, Jon. 2019. “‘Transformative’ Open Access Publishing Deals Are Only Entrenching Commercial Power.” Times Higher Ed, August 15, 2019. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/transformative-open-access-publishing-deals-are-only-entrenching-commercial-power.