Anyone with an interest in Open Science and the role of repositories will find the ATG interview with Abel Packer, co-founder of SciELO, fascinating. SciELO is both a national provider of publishing services for journals, and an aggregator of content, active in Latin America and South Africa. SciELO anticipates many of the Open Science ideas only now being introduced in Europe and North America.
The origins of SciELO are back in the 1970s and 80s, when Packer was involved in disseminating medical databases, notably MEDline. However, people requested not just titles and abstracts, but the full text, and so SciELO came about: built using whatever technology existed at the time, and in the public domain from the start “because that was the way Latin America worked with bibliographic systems.” Its original scope was to make the scientific literature produced in Latin America visible, beginning with just ten Brazilian journals. From SciELO’s launch in 1997 it used fully marked-up SGML (the precursor of XML) rather than PDF for publishing. Today, SciELO operates in 17 countries, and is the default publication platform for quality journals in Latin America. SciELO applies acceptance criteria for its content: unlike, say OpenAlex, SciELO has strict quality controls such as requiring peer review, so the number of journals it indexes is smaller, but the quality – and markup – is higher. In fact, argues Packer, the quality criteria for SciELO is higher than for acceptance in European collections such as Scopus and Web of Science. SciELO provides not only quality refereeing, but assistance for journals to provide English-language metadata and XML markup, to meet the acceptance criteria. More remarkably still, SciELO is decentralized: there is no single owner, not even any signed agreement between countries; everything is voluntary, nor is there any payment between national partners. Each country funds their own activity, funded by the government of that country. The result is, as Packer describes it, “a common flow of information to a common space”, which means that, over time, “it will be possible progressively to overcome the restriction that you have in traditional journals”. The decentralization helps to make it sustainable.
I really do not know, for example, why Europe did not adopt SciELO for their countries … because SciELO is decentralized, you could index and publish in open access the best journals in Europe … SciELO has 20 years of decentralized operation.
SciELO holds articles, books, even grey literature, and research data, and is currently trialling publishing peer review reports on the platform (expected within two years). The average APC cost for journal articles in SciELO is around $300 – a tiny fraction of the cost in the US and Europe. In other words, SciELO has created a national model that meets many of the criteria of Open Science, and is already running them on a wider scale than any corresponding initiative in the US or Europe. It’s a fascinating story!
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