Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A Brazilian medical journal joins SciELO Brasil and publishes JATS-XML articles under CC BY.
- Is an instance
A meta-research study uses SciELO's open citation graph for regional analysis.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Excluding SciELO-indexed journals from a hiring committee's recognised venues list.
- Not an instance
Treating SciELO as a 'developing-country' supplement rather than a primary scholarly infrastructure.
Editorial commentary
SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online, scielo.org) is a full-text, quality-certified journal publishing platform, not merely an index of existing journals. It began in Brazil in 1997-98, created by FAPESP (the Sao Paulo state research funder) together with BIREME (the Pan American Health Organization’s Latin American and Caribbean health-sciences information centre), and has since grown into a network of national and thematic collections spanning most of Latin America plus Spain, Portugal and South Africa. Each national collection is run by a local coordinating institution and applies a shared set of editorial-quality and technical criteria before a journal is admitted, and re-evaluates admitted titles periodically to stay in the collection.
What “SciELO-indexed” operationally means
A journal earns SciELO status by demonstrating, to its national collection’s evaluation committee, sustained periodicity, a documented peer-review process, an editorial board with real institutional affiliations, and compliance with SciELO’s technical publishing requirements — most consequentially, structured JATS-XML markup for every article rather than PDF-only publishing. That XML requirement is what lets SciELO expose machine-readable citation, funding, and author data across the whole network, feed the SciELO Citation Index (co-developed with Clarivate for Web of Science), and support the SciELO Data companion repository for datasets. Admission is a standing evaluation, not a one-time listing: a title that stops meeting periodicity or peer-review documentation requirements can be moved to a “on evaluation” or delisted status.
How it differs from Latindex and AmeliCA
SciELO, Latindex and AmeliCA are frequently mentioned together but do different jobs. Latindex is a bibliographic directory and quality-criteria catalogue — it registers metadata about journals and certifies against a documented checklist, but it does not host full text or typeset articles. SciELO hosts and technically publishes the full text itself, under a common technology stack, once a title clears its editorial bar. AmeliCA is a cooperative publishing-infrastructure and advocacy initiative built to sustain diamond (no-fee) open access specifically, growing out of the Redalyc network. A single journal can legitimately appear in all three simultaneously — SciELO for hosting and XML production, Latindex for regional discoverability, AmeliCA for cooperative sustainability support — they are complementary layers, not competing indexes.
Worked example / counter-example
A Brazilian medical journal that joins SciELO Brasil publishes each accepted article as structured JATS-XML under a CC BY licence and appears in the SciELO Citation Index within Web of Science. By contrast, a journal that appears only in the Latindex Directory (the base, non-evaluated tier of Latindex registration) has not thereby been reviewed against SciELO’s editorial and technical criteria and is not “SciELO-indexed” — Directory listing and SciELO admission answer different questions.
References
- scielo.org, “About SciELO.”
- Packer, A.L., “SciELO: An electronic publishing model for developing countries,” Information Services & Use, 1998.
Also known as
SciELO Network · SciELO Brazil
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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