Number of English-language articles outstrips those in Portuguese on SciELO Brasil

Percentage of English-language texts jumped from 38% in 2007 to 52% in 2012.

By Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – The number of scientific articles published in English in the periodicals catalogued by SciELO Brasil - Scientific Electronic Library Online, a program sponsored by FAPESP and the Virtual Health Library (Bireme), has outstripped the total number of articles available in Portuguese.

SciELO Brasil catalogues 270 journals, a selection of the main open-access scientific titles available online.

The trend of increasing publication of Brazilian scientific articles in English is added to a series of efforts to increase the visibility and international impact of articles published in periodicals indexed by the SciELO network, which remains low in comparison to developed countries.

Abel Packer, coordinator of the SciELO program, reported the trend in a meeting to evaluate the program held on October 22, the eve of an official conference to celebrate 15 years of the SciELO network.

Held at Hotel Intercontinental in São Paulo, the meeting brought together specialists in research and scientific communication from 25 countries to discuss open-access scientific communication and the challenges for the development of scientific periodicals.

“An incredible phenomenon is unfolding in Brazil: the publication of a greater number of scientific articles in English than in national magazines,” Packer said. “In the last three years, we have followed the increase, and in 2012, they corresponded to more than half of the articles published.” According to the most recent SciELO Network report, the number of English-language scientific articles published in Brazilian journals indexed by SciELO Brasil rose from 38% in 2007 to 52% in 2012.

The number of bilingual articles (Portuguese and English) also increased. Of the articles published in Brazilian journals indexed by SciELO Brasil, 16% are available in both Portuguese and English. Approximately 36% of the articles in Brazilian journals in the health sciences category – which represents the largest number of publications, followed by human sciences, and is the area most committed to a bilingual publication strategy – are in Portuguese and English.

“The increase in the number of articles published in English or in Portuguese and English is the result of very large and costly efforts by scientific societies, editors and the publications themselves,” said Packer. “This effort should continue so that we are competitive in publication of the results of our studies and so that we are not relegated to doing science solely on the national level.”

Lines of action

According to Packer, publication of articles in English, in journals in Brazil as well as in South Africa and 14 other Ibero-American countries – that is, the 16 collections indexed by the SciELO Network – is a fundamental step toward increasing the visibility, quality, use and impact of the periodicals to promote internationalization of the collections.

Together, SciELO’s 16 collections occupied first place among open-access portals as ranked by Webometrics. They accumulated more than 400,000 articles over 15 years, registering a daily average of more than 1.5 million accesses and downloads in 2012. However, these statistics for the 1,000 periodicals indexed by the network remain low in comparison with more affluent countries.

Approximately 90% of the SciELO periodicals found in international indexes such as Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and Scimago Journal Ranking have below-average impact factors in their respective thematic areas.

“There are many other problems that affect the performance of the SciELO network’s periodical collections,” Packer said in the opening ceremony of the conference.

Some of the factors that account for the poor performance of the collections and of the majority of the periodicals, according to specialists at the conference, are the quality and international relevance of published research, the language of the publications and the small number of articles published in collaboration with foreign researchers.

In general, the scientific periodicals from the 16 countries in the SciELO network continue to operate with editorial processes that need to achieve a higher degree of professionalism and international insertion, in addition to more stable funding models, because the majority depend on governmental support. Delays in the publication of articles in indexed magazines, for example, are still common.

“Improving the quality of periodicals indexed by SciELO requires a rigorous peer-review system, cutting-edge editing and publication services and incorporation of an advance dissemination program, including social networks,” Packer said.

With a view toward increasing the visibility of the periodicals, members of the SciELO network of publishers have collectively adopted a set of actions implemented by SciELO Brazil in the past two years.

The set of actions, which are based on a study conducted by SciELO Brazil and the Brazilian Association of Scientific Editors (ABEC), should be implemented by the end of 2016. They include instituting standardized indicators to monitor national collections; professionalizing and internationalizing functions, processes, and editorial content; and instituting dissemination and marketing actions.

“The idea is to create and implement a publication strategy through which indexed publications on SciELO are integrated, active and sustainable and form an international group of collections,” Packer explained.

Supporting

In his speech during the official opening of the conference, Packer thanked FAPESP for funding the SciELO Network since its launch in 1998 and guaranteeing 90% of the Brazilian portal’s operating costs.

Celso Lafer, FAPESP president, said that the foundation is very happy to fund an institution that plays such a significant role. “FAPESP has been increasingly concerned in the last few years with the internationalization of Brazilian science, based on the perception that knowledge generated worldwide has a transnational dimension.”

“In this regard,” Lafer added, “publication of the national collections of South Africa and the Ibero-American countries that are part of SciELO, covering a wide variety of themes, is an opportunity to project the knowledge generated in these countries and, with it, broaden scientific collaboration.”

FAPESP’s Scientific Director, Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, underscored that SciELO has made a major contribution toward the foundation’s reaching its main objective of promoting scientific and technological development in São Paulo State by releasing scientific results and presenting new ideas.

“When the idea of building the SciELO network was presented to FAPESP in 1997, few people in the world were talking about open access to scientific research,” he said. “The idea of creating SciELO was very advanced.”

At the conference, Brito Cruz led a presentation of the scientific communication actions conducted by FAPESP, including SciELO, and, more recently, the implementation of a policy that requires researchers with FAPESP-funded projects to publish their results on an open access platform as soon as the publication embargo at scientific journals ends.

“We are also discussing a strategy to increase the visibility and impact of scientific magazines published inside and outside of Brazil,” explained Brito Cruz, referring to the need for Brazilian journals to establish themselves as international publications.

The SciELO base was launched in 1998 by FAPESP in technical cooperation with the Virtual Health Library (Bireme/PAHO/WHO). Since 2002, the project has also been supported by the National Scientific and Technological Development Council (CNPq) and has established its institutional infrastructure at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp).

Created to focus on the needs of the scientific community in developing countries, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, the SciELO model encompasses quality control and instruments to measure the frequency of use and impact of the periodicals that it publishes.