SciELO

SciELO
Name	SciELO
Formation	1997
Headquarters	São Paulo
Region served	Brazil; Latin America; Iberian Peninsula; South Africa

SciELO

SciELO is a bibliographic database and digital library for scholarly literature primarily originating from Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, and selected partner countries. It was established to increase visibility, accessibility, and interoperability of regional journals and integrates with international systems for indexing and citation analysis. SciELO supports cross-border scholarly communication involving leading institutions and publishers across multiple countries.

History

SciELO emerged in the late 1990s amid regional efforts to strengthen scholarly communication across Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and other Latin American nations, with foundational ties to institutions such as the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, FAPESP, and the Universidade de São Paulo. Early collaborative projects involved networks associated with UNESCO, PAHO, and national research councils including CONICET and CNPq. The project paralleled developments at the Library of Congress in digital preservation and echoed initiatives from The Wellcome Trust, National Institutes of Health, and projects driven by the European Commission like OpenAIRE. SciELO’s model was influenced by predecessors and contemporaries such as PubMed Central, JSTOR, ArXiv, and CrossRef, adopting metadata interoperability that connected to repositories like HAL and indexing services such as Scopus and Web of Science. Over time SciELO expanded through partnerships with national libraries including the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile and university presses like Cambridge University Press and Elsevier in platform integrations while maintaining distinct regional governance.

Scope and Coverage

SciELO’s collections span tens of thousands of articles across medicine, health sciences, social sciences, humanities, agricultural sciences, engineering, and natural sciences, with participating journals from countries including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Portugal, Spain, and South Africa. The content interfaces through indexing collaborations with PubMed, DOAJ, Dimensions, and Google Scholar, and aligns metadata with identifiers like DOI and ORCID to facilitate linking to repositories such as Zenodo and institutional platforms at Universidade Estadual de Campinas and Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Coverage includes journal titles historically important in the region, often published by institutions such as Universidade de São Paulo, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and professional societies like the Associação Brasileira de Imprensa Científica and the Sociedad Chilena de Medicina. SciELO’s multilingual corpus features Spanish, Portuguese, and English, enabling cross-referencing with global databases maintained by organizations like Wiley-Blackwell, Springer Nature, and Taylor & Francis.

Organization and Governance

SciELO operates through a decentralized network governed by national and regional editorial committees, advisory boards, and technical working groups involving stakeholders such as Universidade de São Paulo, FAPESP, CAPES, CNPq, and ministries of science from participating states. Partner institutions include national libraries, university presses, and research councils like CONICET and ANPCyT. International liaison occurs with agencies such as UNESCO, PAHO, and World Health Organization departments, while strategic interactions connect to consortia like COAR and regional bodies such as the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). Editorial policies reference standards set by organizations including the Committee on Publication Ethics and align with identifier initiatives from CrossRef and researcher identifiers from ORCID.

Technical Platform and Open Access Model

SciELO’s technical stack integrates digital publishing tools and metadata schemas compatible with protocols championed by OpenAIRE and repository software practices used by DSpace and EPrints. It supports persistent identifiers through DOI registration agencies and enables article-level metrics interoperable with services such as Altmetric and Dimensions. The platform’s open access model echoes principles advocated by Budapest Open Access Initiative, Berlin Declaration, and funder mandates from organizations like the Wellcome Trust, NIH, and the European Research Council. Technical interoperability leverages standards promoted by NISO and W3C for metadata exchange, and integrates with scholarly infrastructure such as Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID to support discoverability and citation linking comparable to systems used by Scopus and Web of Science.

Impact and Reception

SciELO has been credited with increasing visibility of Latin American scholarship, influencing citation patterns that affect institutional assessments at universities like Universidade de São Paulo and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and shaping policy discussions at agencies including CAPES, CNPq, and FAPESP. Its role has been assessed in bibliometric studies alongside platforms such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar, and cited in analyses by scholars affiliated with Harvard University, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. International recognition includes use by health organizations such as World Health Organization and public health programs coordinated with PAHO. Critics and advocates debate its integration with global publishing houses like Elsevier and Springer Nature as well as its position relative to open science movements led by actors such as SPARC and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.

Regional and National Initiatives

Regional deployments of SciELO involve coordinated efforts in countries and territories partnering through national hubs and ministries such as Ministry of Science and Technology (Brazil), Ministry of Health (Chile), and national research councils like CONICET (Argentina) and ANII (Uruguay). National initiatives link local publishers, university presses including Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and Universidad de Chile, and professional associations such as the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and the Argentine Academy of Sciences. Collaborations extend to digital heritage institutions like the Biblioteca Nacional de España and governmental research programs funded by agencies such as FONDECYT and FONCYT, fostering regional integration with platforms and consortia including Redalyc, LA Referencia, and SciELO Spain-Portugal initiatives.

Category:Open access databases