SciELO

Last updated
SciELO
SciELO logo.svg
ProducerFAPESP - BIREME (Brazil)
LanguagesEnglish, Portuguese, Spanish
Access
CostFree
Coverage
Disciplines Multidisciplinary
Record depthIndex, abstract & full-text
Format coverage Academic journal articles
Geospatial coverage Latin America, Iberian Peninsula, South Africa
No. of records573,525 [1]
Links
Website scielo.org

SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a bibliographic database, digital library, and cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals. SciELO was created to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countries and provides an efficient way to increase visibility and access to scientific literature. [2] Originally established in Brazil in 1997, today there are 16 countries in the SciELO network and its journal collections: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela. [3]

Contents

SciELO was initially supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) and the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), along with the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information (BIREME). SciELO provides a portal that integrates and provides access to all of the SciELO network sites. Users can search across all SciELO collections or limit the search by a single country collection, or browse by subject area, publisher, or journal title.

Database and projects

By October 2015 the database contained:

from different countries, universally accessible for free open access, in full-text format. [4] The SciELO Project's stated aims are to "envisage the development of a common methodology for the preparation, storage, dissemination and evaluation of scientific literature in electronic format". All journals are published by a special software suite which implements a scientific electronic virtual library accessed via several mechanisms, including a table of titles in alphabetic and subject list, subject and author indexes and a search engine.

History

Project's launch timeline: [5]

  • 1997: Beginning of the development of SciELO as a FAPESP supported project in partnership with BIREME.
  • 1998: SciELO goes live.
  • 1998: Chile's national research agency CONICYT asks to be considered as a pilot project outside of Brazil. [6]
  • 1999-2000: Chile joined as a regional collection, project supported by CONICYT.
  • 2002: the CNPq also began its support for SciELO.
  • 2005: Argentina joined as a regional collection, project supported by CONICET
  • 2009: South Africa joined as a regional collection, project supported by ASSAf.
  • 2012: the SciELO Books project is launched.
  • 2013: the SciELO Citation Index is integrated into Thomson Reuters' Web of Knowledge (WoS), covering about 650 journals total, 300 more than the 350 already in the WoS. [7]
  • 2017 SciELO announced that they were setting up a preprints server – SciELO Preprints. [8]

Open access

In 2013 the Latin American SciELO project completed 15 years of free publishing. [9] Open access has long emphasized access to scholarly materials. However, open access can also mean access to the means of producing visible and recognized journals. This issue is particularly important in developing and emergent countries, [10] where there are other benefits of and challenges for publishing scientific journals in and by emerging countries. [11] SciELO also has a blog entitled "SciELO in Perspective" where scientists and researchers publish articles aimed towards broader audiences. [12]

Technology

Articles are sent to SciELO by publishers in XML or HTML+SGML, using a variety of article DTDs. The SGML DTD was used until 2013, [13] when SciELO started to offer the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) DTD standard for XML deposites. [14] Using to Markup XML a macro in a proprietary desktop application (Microsoft Office Word - DOCX). [15]

In the SciELO portals, received JATS-articles are converted via XSLT to HTML, and "SGML+HTML pack" articles use the HTML content (in general a handmade PDF-to-HTML conversion). This process may reveal errors that are reported back to the publisher for correction. Graphics are also converted to standard formats and sizes. The original and converted forms are archived. The converted form is moved into a relational database, along with associated files for graphics, multimedia, or other associated data. Many publishers also provide PDFs of their articles, and these are made available without change.

Bibliographic citations are (SGML or XML) parsed and automatically linked to the associated articles in SciELO and resources on publishers' Web sites. Unresolvable references, such as journals or particular articles not yet available at one of these sources, are tracked in the database and automatically come "live" when the resources become available.

An in-house indexing system provides search capability.

Tools

Multiple tools exist to allow creation, editing and conversion for SciELO XML. They range from simple crude convertors to full blown XML converters.

Conversion

To SciELO XML

  • MS Word documents and OpenOffice (LibreOffice) documents to SciELO:
    • Typeset: provides automated set of converters for MS-Word to SciELO XML.
    • OxGarage: can convert documents from various XML formats
    • meTypeset: meTypeset "is a fork of the OxGarage stack" "to convert from Microsoft Word .docx format to SciELO XML via JATS XML (using XSLT).
    • Word to Markdown to SciELO XML: This can be done through Pandoc. This process might involve loss of information for certain complex manuscripts containing equations & tables.

From SciELO XML

Take SciELO XML as input, produce a certain output format

The common formats for Production phase are mentioned below:

  • from SciELO to HTML: (for web versions)
    • JATS Preview Stylesheets (canonical XSLT conversion), see classical (2013) conversor.
    • eLife Lens converts NLM XML to JSON for displaying using HTML and Javascript.
    • Typeset Publisher Solution
  • from SciELO to PDF:
    • Typeset converter for SciELO XML to PDF
    • some JATS Preview Stylesheets, XSLT + XSL-FO conversion.
  • from SciELO to ePUB: (for mobile versions)
    • eXtyles

Controversy

In July 2015, Jeffrey Beall, an American librarian, posted an article on his blog referring to the two largest Latin American open access databases (SciELO and Redalyc) as "favelas", [16] which is a derogatory Portuguese term for a slum. Beall stated:

"Many North American scholars have never even heard of these meta-publishers or the journals they aggregate. Their content is largely hidden, the neighborhood remote and unfamiliar."

Among the responses is a motion passed by the Brazilian Forum of Public Health Journals Editors and the Associação Brasileira de Saúde Coletiva (Abrasco, Brazilian Public Health Association). [17] The motion takes exception to Beall's characterization, draws attention to the underlying "ethnocentric prejudice", and corrects factual inaccuracies. As a counterpoint to Beall's "neocolonial point of view", the motion draws attention to work by Vessuri, Guedon and Cetto emphasizing the value of initiatives such as SciELO and Redalyc (also targeted by Beall) to the development of science in Latin America and globally: "In fact, Latin America is using the OA publishing model to a far greater extent than any other region in the world…. Also, because the sense of public mission remains strong among Latin American universities… these current initiatives demonstrate that the region contributes more and more to the global knowledge exchange while positioning research literature as a public good." [18]

See also

Related Research Articles

A document type definition (DTD) is a set of markup declarations that define a document type for an SGML-family markup language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Markup language</span> Modern system for annotating a document

A markuplanguage is a text-encoding system consisting of a set of symbols inserted in a text document to control its structure, formatting, or the relationship between its parts. Markup is often used to control the display of the document or to enrich its content to facilitate automated processing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Standard Generalized Markup Language</span> Markup language

The Standard Generalized Markup Language is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on two postulates":

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XML</span> Markup language by the W3C for encoding of data

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML.

DocBook is a semantic markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software, but it can be used for any other sort of documentation.

Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) is a mathematical markup language, an application of XML for describing mathematical notations and capturing both its structure and content, and is one of a number of mathematical markup languages. Its aim is to natively integrate mathematical formulae into World Wide Web pages and other documents. It is part of HTML5 and is a ISO/IEC standard ISO/IEC 40314 since 2015.

In computing, AAP DTD is a set of three SGML Document Type Definitions for scientific documents, defined by the Association of American Publishers. It was ratified as a U.S. standard under the name ANSI/NISO Z39.59 in 1988, and evolved into the international ISO 12083 standard in 1993. It was supplanted as a U.S. standard by ANSI/ISO 12083 in 1995.

Apache AxKit was an XML Apache publishing framework run by the Apache foundation written in Perl. It provided conversion from XML to any format, such as HTML, WAP or text using either W3C standard techniques, or flexible custom code.

PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed Central is more than a document repository. Submissions to PMC are indexed and formatted for enhanced metadata, medical ontology, and unique identifiers which enrich the XML structured data for each article. Content within PMC can be linked to other NCBI databases and accessed via Entrez search and retrieval systems, further enhancing the public's ability to discover, read and build upon its biomedical knowledge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oxygen XML Editor</span>

The Oxygen XML Editor is a multi-platform XML editor, XSLT/XQuery debugger and profiler with Unicode support. It is a Java application so it can run in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It also has a version that can run as an Eclipse plugin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SoftQuad Software</span>

SoftQuad Software was a Canadian software company best known for HoTMetaL, the first commercial HTML editor. It is also known for Author/Editor, the first specialized SGML editor, and Panorama, the first browser plugin for SGML. Panorama demonstrated the need for standardization of SGML on the web, which eventually resulted in the development of the XML specification.

The Redalyc project is a bibliographic database and a digital library of Open Access journals, supported by the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México with the help of numerous other higher education institutions and information systems.

A Formal Public Identifier (FPI) is a short piece of text with a particular structure that may be used to uniquely identify a product, specification or document. FPIs were introduced as part of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and serve particular purposes in formats historically derived from SGML. Some of their most common uses are as part of document type declarations (DOCTYPEs) and document type definitions (DTDs) in SGML, XML and historically HTML, but they are also used in the vCard and iCalendar file formats to identify the software product which generated the file.

Stylus Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for the Extensible Markup Language (XML). It consists of a variety of tools and visual designers to edit and transform XML documents and legacy data such as electronic data interchange (EDI), comma-separated values (CSV) and relational data.

A document type declaration, or DOCTYPE, is an instruction that associates a particular XML or SGML document with a document type definition (DTD). In the serialized form of the document, it manifests as a short string of markup that conforms to a particular syntax.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Journal Article Tag Suite</span>

The Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is an XML format used to describe scientific literature published online. It is a technical standard developed by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and approved by the American National Standards Institute with the code Z39.96-2012.

ISO 12083 is an international SGML standard for document interchange between authors and publishers. It features separate Document Type Definitions for books, serials, articles, and math. Derived from AAP DTD, it was first published in 1993, revised in 1994, and last confirmed in 2016.

The following is a timeline of the international movement for open access to scholarly communication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access in Spain</span> Overview of the culture and regulation of open access in Spain

In Spain, the national 2011 "Ley de la Ciencia, la Tecnología y la Innovación" requires open access publishing for research that has been produced with public funding. The first peer-reviewed open access Spanish journal, Relieve, began in 1995. Publishers CSIC Press and Hipatia Press belong to the international Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.

References

  1. ↑ "SciELO" . Retrieved 19 October 2015.
  2. ↑ Packer, Abel (October 2000). "SciELO - a Model for Cooperative Electronic Publishing in Developing Countries". D-Lib Magazine. Vol. 6, no. 10. ISSN   1082-9873.
  3. ↑ "SciELO.org - Scientific Electronic Library Online". www.scielo.org. Retrieved 2015-10-19.
  4. ↑ "SciELO in numbers". SciELO. Retrieved 27 June 2014.
  5. ↑ "The SciELO 15 Years Conference is a milestone in SciELO's History". SciELO in Perspective. 5 November 2013. Retrieved 15 February 2014.
  6. ↑ Prat, Anna María (2000). "Programa Biblioteca Científica Electrónica en Línea, SciELO-Chile: una nueva forma de acceder a la literatura científica nacional" [Online Electronic Scientific Library Program, SciELO-Chile: a new way of accessing national scientific literature]. Biological Research (in Spanish). 33 (2). doi: 10.4067/S0716-97602000000200003 . ISSN   0716-9760.
  7. ↑ "Thomson Reuters Collaborates with SciELO to Showcase Emerging Research Centers within Web of Knowledge".
  8. ↑ "SciELO Preprints on the way". SciELO in Perspective. 2017-02-22. Retrieved 2017-02-22.
  9. ↑ Van Noorden, R. (2013). "Brazil fêtes open-access site". Nature. 502 (7472): 418. Bibcode:2013Natur.502..418V. doi: 10.1038/502418a . ISSN   0028-0836. PMID   24153270.
  10. ↑ Packer, Abel L. (2009). "The SciELO Open Access: A Gold Way from the South". Canadian Journal of Higher Education. 39 (3): 111–126. doi: 10.47678/cjhe.v39i3.479 . ISSN   0316-1218.
  11. ↑ Meneghini, Rogerio (1 February 2012). "Emerging journals". EMBO Reports. 13 (2): 106–108. doi:10.1038/embor.2011.252. ISSN   1469-221X. PMC   3271339 . PMID   22240975.
  12. ↑ "Your research is published - what now? 7 simple tips to communicate it effectively". Labs Explorer. Retrieved 2020-06-09.[ dead link ]
  13. ↑ Packer, Abel L.; Salgado, Eliana; Araujo, Javani; Aquino, Letícia; Almeida, Renata; Santos, Jesner; Lucena, Suely; Soares, Caroline M. (4 April 2014). "Why XML?". SciELO in Perspective.
  14. ↑ "Guia de uso de elementos e atributos XML para documentos que seguem a implementação SciELO Publishing Schema. — documentação SciELO Publishing Schema 1.7".
  15. ↑ "Markup Program — SciELO PC Programs 4.0.094 documentation".
  16. ↑ Jeffrey Beall (30 July 2015). "Is SciELO a Publication Favela?". Scholarly Open Access. Archived from the original on 2016-11-08.
  17. ↑ "Motion to repudiate Mr. Jeffrey Beall's classist attack on SciELO". SciELO in Perspective. 2 August 2015. Retrieved 12 October 2015.
  18. ↑ Vessuri, Hebe; Guédon, Jean-Claude; Cetto, Ana María (4 December 2013). "Excellence or quality? Impact of the current competition regime on science and scientific publishing in Latin America and its implications for development" (PDF). Current Sociology. 62 (5): 647–665. doi:10.1177/0011392113512839. ISSN   0011-3921. S2CID   25166127.

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