Launched in 1998 with a set of 10 Brazilian journals, Brazilian online scientific library SciELO now has 291 open-access Brazilian publications across all fields of knowledge, and the website receives more than 800,000 visits per day. The model has expanded into 15 other countries over the last two decades, including Argentina, Spain, and South Africa, and the electronic library now has a total of 1,285 periodicals from around the world. SciELO celebrated its 20th anniversary with a conference in São Paulo in September, where discussions were held on the latest innovations in scientific communication and the challenges of open science, which involves open access to information and collaborative construction of knowledge. During the event, SciELO announced plans to create a preprints repository in partnership with the Public Knowledge Project, an international organization that develops free open-source software. “Preprints are a way of making a publication more acceptable. It makes science more widely available, but many people still think the key is to review papers before they are made available to everyone,” Rogério Meneghini, SciELO’s scientific coordinator, told FAPESP. There were also debates on the global trend of providing access to the raw data, computer code, and images used in research but not usually published in finished articles. “We want to accelerate communication, including during the article approval process, making it transparent, ethical, and committed to scientific rigor,” said Abel Packer, SciELO’s general coordinator.
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