SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a bibliographic database, digital library, and cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals. Originally established in Brazil in 1997, it has expanded to include collections from Latin America, Spain, and Portugal.
To further their mission, SciELO has launched a preprint server using OPS. Alex Mendonça, who is co-leading the transition towards Open Science, tells us more about SciELO Preprints:
Since its conceptualization to its operation, our team has focused on running a preprint server that follows Open Science best practices. From the beginning, we had the mindset that preprint is an integral part of the research communication flow, along with journals. We’ve been working closely with SciELO journals in order to help them take advantage of the benefits of preprints. One of our main concerns is quality, so although authors take full responsibility of what’s posted as a preprint, we have established a three-level moderation approach to ensure a minimum quality control. Our top-level moderation step is done by a SciELO journal Editor-in-Chief, in alignment with our strategy of helping journals take advantage of the benefits of preprints.
Following SciELO’s own principles, it was imperative for our preprint server to have multilingual capabilities and be interoperable with other services and platforms. The community-based and open-source aspects have been core values for PKP and for SciELO. Those aspects allow us to enhance the platform by working with different partners, making it a platform that serves the community, from the community. Its proximity and similarities with OJS play an important role in making preprints an integral part of the research communication flow. The PKP team has been very committed and supportive in making OPS a state-of-the-art preprint server and we’ve been working together, along with other partners from the community, in continuing to enhance OPS according to the best practices of Open Science.
Because of OPS’s open-source and community-driven characteristic, it allows us to develop plugins or adapt plugins that have already been developed for OJS and extend OPS’s default capacities. It also allows us to easily integrate with other platforms that serve the research community, such as Dataverse, PREreview and Plaudit, to name a few. We have a particular moderation workflow, with specific steps. We developed a few plugins to support our work with that workflow without changing a single line of OPS’s core code. This allows us to safely upgrade the platform whenever a new version is released, keeping the software secure and updated while still being able to maintain our specific moderation workflow. Many of the plugins we’ve developed are already available for anyone who would like to use them in their own OPS installation. That’s one of the main benefits of open-source software. We’re also very excited with what we will achieve with the integration with OJS.
Alex Mendonça has been working at SciELO Brazil since 2006 and is part of its Coordination Board since 2014. He oversees the development of the SciELO Preprints server, promotes the adoption of open data, and makes the peer review process more transparent and open. In 2017, Alex joined the Technical Committee of the Public Knowledge Project and has been part of it since.
