Presentation at the SciELO SA User Group meeting Cape Town 29 July 2014 Speaker: Louise van Heerden

1. SciELO SA GROWTH, CRITERIA
AND USAGE
SciELO SA User’s Group Meeting
29 July 2014

2. SciELO SA GROWTH,
CRITERIA AND USAGE
SciELO – Scientific Electronic Library Online
Growth:
• 41 titles to date with 1 title to be added per month
• DHET has provided funding for backfiles to be created for the
above 41 titles dating back to 2008.
• During the 2014/2015 financial year an additional 12 titles will
be added to the collection.
Future: Ideally up to 180 South African scholarly journals will
be published in the collection.

3. SciELO SA GROWTH,
CRITERIA AND USAGE
Advantages of becoming part of the
SciELO SA Collection
The SciELO SA Collection (www.scielo.org.za) was established by the Academy of Science
of South Africa (ASSAf) and is funded by the Department of Science and Technology and
endorsed by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET)
SciELO is an integral part of the SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) portal, which
had its origins in Brazil and is now distributed across most South American countries
SciELO SA aims to become a fully indexed open-access journal collection in the service of
the South African research community through effective quality assurance, worldwide
visibility, accessibility and impact, and amenability to bibliometric analysis

4. SciELO SA GROWTH,
CRITERIA AND USAGE
Advantages of becoming part of the
SciELO SA Collection (continued)
Journals appearing in the SciELO SA Collection will in future receive accreditation and a
subsidy from the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET)
SciELO SA is connected to international indexing services, e.g. Thomson Reuter’s Web of
Knowledge now integrates the SciELO Citation Index
The SciELO Network Portal is fast becoming the most promising multinational journal
indexing and publishing model in the developing world
The SciELO Network provides opportunities for south/south collaboration between
researchers.

5. SciELO SA GROWTH,
CRITERIA AND USAGE
Process to become part of (and remain part of)
SciELO SA
DHET accreditation and a positive evaluation by the ASSAf peer-review panel
Journals are invited to join the SciELO SA collection
Journal editor completes the necessary SciELO adhesion form and sends ASSAf the PDFs
of its most recent journal issue
Journal (editorial board) signs the publishing agreement
If the journal remains current for 6 months then it is included in the Web of Knowledge
SciELO Citation Index

6. SciELO SA GROWTH,
CRITERIA AND USAGE
Process to become part of (and remain part of) SciELO SA (continued)
Currency is evaluated every 6 months (end-June & end-Dec)
If not current the journal is excluded from Web of Knowledge for the next 6-month period
If journals have become current again, then they are included in the Web of Knowledge
platform again for the next 6 months
If a journal’s currency starts threatening the certification evaluation of the SciELO SA Collection
then a letter requesting improved currency will be sent to the editor
If the journal cannot improve its currency within the next 12 months then it will be temporarily
removed from the collection
Once the currency of the journal improves again, it will become part of the collection again

7. SciELO SA GROWTH,
CRITERIA AND USAGE
Every 6 months all SciELO collections are
re-evaluated to retain their certification
CRITERIA
•Exact compliance to SciELO standards
•Open access – no embargoes – articles need to be made available on
publication
•Journals may not indicate that ”permission needs to be asked to print or
use the documents”.

8. SciELO SA GROWTH,
CRITERIA AND USAGE
Criteria (continued)
•Adoption of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence
(preferably Cc-BY) SA 2.1, 2.5 or 3.0
•Minimum of 12 research articles per year
•Currency
•Rolling pass journals: Need to publish at least 3 articles by
the end of April

9. SciELO SA GROWTH,
CRITERIA AND USAGE
There are 7 SciELO SA journals that are not at
present part of Web of Knowledge
due to currency problems

10. SciELO SA GROWTH,
CRITERIA AND USAGE
Usage
The usage statistics from the SciELO SA platform indicate that 949
013 full-text articles were viewed via the SciELO SA platform over
the last 12 months.

11. SciELO SA GROWTH,
CRITERIA AND USAGE

12. SciELO SA GROWTH,
CRITERIA AND USAGE
Louise van Heerden
SciELO SA Operations Manager
louise@assaf.org.za