Improved open access research platform launched - University World News

"A vastly improved scheme that provides free access to African research will be launched by South Africa’s Minister of Science and Technology Derek Hanekom on 22 July. The scholarly platform became a full family member of the SciELO Network Global Portal three months ago. Since its inception in 1987 in Brazil, the online open access SciELO indexed platform has been successfully implemented in another eight countries: Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Cuba, Spain, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. SciELO was first established in Africa by the Academy of Science for South Africa, or ASSAf, in 2009. 'We took a tentative step towards making scholarly publishing, and scholarly journals in particular, more accessible in a developing society to meet the demands for high-level skills in emerging economies,' Susan Veldsman, director of the scholarly publishing unit at ASSAf, told University World News. She said the SciELO-SA collection started as a pilot in order to demonstrate its value and impact to the research community, evolving to an ‘in development’ status. Over the past four years SciELO-SA had achieved the ‘mandatory quality criteria’ – conditions a journal has to comply with in order to be published on the platform – Veldsman explained. The platform has also been certified as able to comply with publishing standards, periodicity, data curation and management, bandwidth and intellectual property rights, among other things. Veldsman said this meant that all the Scientific Electronic Online Library – also known as SciELO – journals appear on the Web of Knowledge platform as the SciELO Citation Index. SciELO-SA started appearing on the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge, or WoK, in January this year. WoK’s interface will allow subscribed users to access the journal collection Web of Science, or WoS, and SciELO together, as well as other individual collections ..."