1.
SciELO: South Africa: implementation
of policy advice by an Academy of
Science
Robin Crewe
Chair: Committee on Scholarly Publishing in South
Africa (CSPiSA)
Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf)
1

2.
Academy Reports on Scholarly
Publication
2006 – Report of a Strategic Approach to Research
publishing in South Africa
2009 – Scholarly Books: their production, use and
evaluation in South Africa today.
2

3.
Report on Research Publishing
The 2006 ASSAf report identified the following:
“the …. low visibility of the existing local journals, most
appearing only in print and with low circulation
figures, and with few achieving inclusion in
prominent international journal indexes, as the key
barrier to general enhancement of the quantity and
quality of locally performed research” Gevers
(2013)”.
3

4.
Academy Committee on Scholarly
Publishing (CSPiSA)
Supported by The Scholarly Publishing Unit (SPU)
Functions of the Unit –
 National Scholarly (Journal) Editors’ Forum
 National Scholarly Book Publishers’ Forum
 Open Access Platform –SciELO SA
 Discipline-grouped Peer review panels for journals
 Online Scientific writing courses
4

5.
Global Open Access to Quality Local
Journals
To achieve this:
-Task Team to review possible National Platform for
Open Access Publishing lead by Wieland Gevers
Reviewed potential international platforms
Visited SciELO, Brazil 7-11 June 2008
Concluded that SciELO started in Brazil would best
achieve this purpose
5

6.
HISTORY OF SciELO SA
 Following Task Team visit in 2008. Pilot Established:
mid-2009 with 7 titles
 SciELO Brazil hosted the platform and did all the epublication, including mark-up of articles.
 ASSAf started doing more and more mark-up of
articles. 2010-2011
 ASSAf took over ALL the e-publication and IT
processes of its collection 2012
6

7.
TRAINING OF SciELO SA
Brazil
South
Africa
7

8.
Policy Environment in South Africa
 Department of Higher Education and Training –
Responsible for funding Higher Education
Institutions
Introduced research incentive scheme for
Universities in 2003
Direct funding of ‘research publication outputs’
via publication units – US$ 12 000/ unit
 Department of Science and Technology –
National Research Foundation – funding
individual scholars
8

9.
Current South African Publications
9

10.
Endorsement of ASSAf reports
 Both departments of government endorsed the
reports on scholarly publishing.
 DST supported and funded extension to South
Africa of the SciELO e-publishing platform.
 SciELO SA is a premier, OA searchable, full-text and
fully indexed journal database that covers a selected
collection of peer-reviewed scholarly journals.
 It is an integral part of a project being developed by
FAPESP in partnership with BIREME.
10

11.
Academy Committee on Scholarly
Publishing (CSPiSA)
Supported by The Scholarly Publishing Unit (SPU)
Functions of the Unit –
 National Scholarly (Journal) Editors’ Forum
 National Scholarly Book Publishers’ Forum
 Open Access Platform –SciELO SA
 Discipline-grouped Peer review panels for journals
 Online Scientific writing courses
11

12.
Return to Policy Environment
Categories:
-Full length peer-reviewed journal articles
-Scholarly books and chapters in books
-Conference proceedings
12

13.
Return to the Policy Environment II
 Policy makes provision for the recognition of
papers appearing on approved lists: ISI, IBSS
indices and list of South African Journals
 Peer review by ASSAf of South African
journals to be considered for inclusion in
South African list
 Journals approved by peer review can be
included on SciELO SA and recognised for
research incentives.
13

14.
Status of SciELO SA
 April 2013 - SciELO SA Collection was certified as an
independent collection.
 Currently 28 South African journals are listed as part
of the collection
 Journals in the following disciplinary groups have
been reviewed – Social Sciences; Agriculture and
Related Basic Sciences
 Disciplinary groups under review – Religion,
Theology and related Fields; Health Sciences and
related Medical Fields; Law and related Legal Fields;
Humanities Part 1: Literature Group
14

15.
SciELO SA Launch - Certification
15

16.
Policy on OA for Publically Funded
Research
 USA, UK, the EU granting agencies and some grant
funders are developing policies to make OA
mandatory for the research they fund
 Funds made available in grants for this purpose
 In SA, there are 12 institutions that have signed the
Berlin Declaration on OA – institutional initiative
 No established government Open Access Policy
 MRC allows use of grants for OA costs
16

17.
SciELO SA and quality assurance
 “Get scientific nonsense published”- study by John
Bohannon reported in Science of quality of peer
review in OA journals
 The findings were damning in that a large number of
journals were not undertaking appropriate peer
review and their process of acceptance was flawed.
 OA platforms need to be vigilant in monitoring
journal publishing practices
 As with paper based journals the quality of the
reviewing process is key to credibility.
17

18.
Obrigado
Gracias
Thank you
18