OLIVA: The Scientific output in journals edited in Latin America. Disciplinary Diversity, Institutional Collaboration, and Multilingualism in SciELO and Redalyc (1995-2018) *

Abstract

This article presents the results of the Latin American Observatory of eVAluation Indicators (OLIVA, its Spanish acronym) which aims to contribute to the visibility of indexed scientific output in Latin America and the Caribbean and enhance its value in evaluation systems. This study addresses the production published in open access by journals indexed in SciELO and Redalyc, based on a single database of a total of 1,720 journals (from 15 countries), 908,982 documents and 2,591,704 authors. It also highlights its disciplinary diversity, and trends in national and international research collaboration. Finally, only for the case of Brazil and SciELO, intranational collaboration is analyzed. The study concludes that there is a predominance of diamond journals, of university publishing institutions and of multiscalar forms of circulation. These characteristics, even with linguistic and disciplinary diversity, can contribute very effectively to the current needs of science communication in times of open science.

Multilingualism in Scientific Literature Communicated by Journals from the SciELO Brazil Collection

“…Over the last four decades, the SciELO model was developed within a Latin American and Caribbean environment of open-access related capacities and infrastructures, involving policies, methodologies, technologies, systems, products, and services of scholarly communication. It highlights systems such as the Latin American Population Documentation System (DOCPAL/CELADE), Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Literature (LILACS), the Scientific Information System Redalyc, the Regional Cooperative Online Information System for Scholarly Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain, and Portugal (Latindex) and the Federated Network of Institutional Repositories of Scientific Publications (LA Referencia) (Beigel et al 2024). After 25 years of continuous development, SciELO is asserting itself as an open-science communication programme as part of the global flow with unique characteristics expressed by the motto 'SciELO Open Science with IDEIA -Impact, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility' − that serves as an experience and model for national research systems (SciELO 2023c).…”

“…In fact, half of the journals in the SciELO Brazil collection were created after 1995. Second, the national Portuguese language limits international collaboration and the submission of articles from abroad, a condition that is less restrictive to SciELO journals in Hispanic-American countries, which communicate a high proportion of research from other countries (Beigel et al 2024;Salatino 2023). Thus, in the year 2006, a total of 200 journals of SciELO Brazil published 71% of their articles in Portuguese.…”