WHAT ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING MEANS FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES?  THE SciELO PROJECT INITIATIVE FOR LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARRIBEAN.
Abel L. Packer
BIREME/PAHO/WHO

Preliminary versions
October 5, 1998

Electronic publishing represents a unique opportunity for developing countries to promote the advancement of their scientific communication. Information technologies, in all aspects, specially the networking of desktop computers through the Internet, are becoming widely available for scientific communities in developing countries. This is already true for all major universities and organizations that deal with scientific information. This means that most of the technics to carry out desktop publishing are already available to scientific editors and publishers from developing countries. In fact, most of the journals published in paper today make use of desktop publishing technologies and there are important initiatives toward electronic publishing. In parallel, authors and readers are progressively connected to the Internet from offices and/or home computers. It is becoming natural, or even mandatory, the transition to electronic publishing from the point of view of publishers, editors, libraries and authors. This transition, however, poses political, economical, managerial and technical challenges.

Electronic publishing encompasses a great variety of new possibilities and challenges for scientific communication, in such a way that its adoption represents a movement which may be largely extended beyond the simple reproduction or delivery of journal's paper versions in electronic format. This view is particularly true and important for developing countries where the overall process of scientific communication faces several limitations and barriers. The transition to electronic publishing involves necessarily a review of that process. Given this opportunity, why not orient the transition to minimize the current limitations and overcome the main barriers? This is the challenge that is posed to scientific authorities in developing countries today. At the same time, international organizations related to scientific communication are expected to play an important role on the promotion of technical cooperation to stimulate and support developing countries initiatives.

Electronic publishing over Internet / Web represents per se a possibility to increase the visibility and accessibility of scientific journals from developing countries, in a national and international levels. However, simply publishing journals on the Web, or importing inadequate solutions from developed countries do not address all the aspects related to visibility as stated before. First, because the search for scientific literature is still driven by referential databases. And, second, because the online retrieval services progressively generates citations with links to the electronic full text, when available. On the other side, full text articles are being increasingly enriched with dynamic links to database references. This means that the interconnection between articles and referential databases is increasing more and more the role the international indexes play nowadays. In brief, to completely address the visibility problem, it is indispensable that developing countries create or improve existent national and international indexes that complement the indexes operated in the developed world. Those indexes are also indispensable to establish bibliographical control over the scientific literature from developing countries, and avoid the dispersion of individual electronic journals through out the Internet / Web, in many cases with incompatible interfaces.

Other major problem that affects scientific communication in developing countries refers to the absence of systematic evaluation procedures to measure the impact of journals and articles not covered by ISI citation indexes. Although several initiatives to evaluate developing countries journals have been emerged in the last years, including the research of additional indicators to those published by ISI, most initiatives have not yet achieved national or international acceptance. In most cases, scientific authorities tend to rely exclusively on ISI indexes to evaluate national scientific production. It is, therefore, indispensable that developing countries create their own mechanisms to systematically evaluate the performance of their scientific journals. Electronic publishing has in hand all the tools to incorporate the automatic computation of indicators regarding the access to article journals, as well as indicators of impact as measured by citation analysis. This implies that electronic publishing may be conceived and adopted by developing countries with much more inner capabilities than paper publishing.

An example of an articulated movement to address the scientific electronic publishing in developing countries is given by the SciELO Project (Scientific Electronic Library Online), which is coordinated by FAPESP, a governmental foundation aimed at supporting scientific research, and by BIREME, the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information, a center of the Pan American Health Organization, the WHO office for the Americas. The project is implemented in partnership with a selected group of Brazilian scientific editors.

The SciELO Project was launched in March 1997, with the specific objective of developing a methodology for the preparation, storage, dissemination and evaluation of scientific journals, envisaging to contribute to the development of the Brazilian science by increasing and improving publication and dissemination processes, as well as evaluation procedures for scientific literature. The first version of the methodology was developed during 1997 and the first semester of 1998, including its application in and operation of an Internet / Web electronic library of 10 journals. In June 1998, the project started its second phase aiming at the publication of 70 to 100 most important Brazilian journal titles during the next two years. In addition, the SciELO methodology is expected to be widely disseminated through out Latin American and the Caribbean countries in the near future. Chile has already started a pilot project using that methodology to operate an electronic library of Chilean scientific journals. Venezuela and Colombia are already working on plans to implement similar projects still in 1998. Through those national projects, BIREME expects to extend SciELO library to about 100 health sciences journals from Latin America and Caribbean in the next three years.

The SciELO methodology makes intensive use of information technology envisaging to contribute to overcome the major problems related to the accessibility, visibility and evaluation of scientific journals from developing countries, particularly from Latin America and Caribbean. While using technology that is appropriate and affordable to developing countries, it is compatible with international systems and with the emerging standards and experiences in the field of electronic publishing. The main characteristics of SciELO methodology are the following:

- SciELO methodology represents a solution for the transition to electronic publishing. It includes a set of guidelines and software tools that permit publishers and editors to create an electronic version of their journals without interrupting the current printed version. In the near future, some of them may want to opt to publish only the electronic version. New journals exclusively in electronic format may also use the methodology. In addition to publish journals in Internet / Web sites, the SciELO methodology permits the search for articles via bibliographical elements (author, title, abstract, keywords etc.), and establishes control of accessing, enabling the computation of bibliometric indicators.

- The main application of SciELO methodology in Brazil and in other countries of Latin America and Caribbean is to build national Internet / Web based electronic libraries of scientific journals, covering all disciplines or a specific area, such as health sciences. Those SciELO sites, which are expected to be operated by national scientific institutions, intend to publish the collection of the main journal titles from each country. With national sites, publishers and editors have an unique opportunity to enter the world of electronic publishing without dealing with all managerial and technical aspects which represent, in most cases, an insuperable barrier.

- SciELO national sites offer end users and libraries worldwide an easy and efficient way of accesing full text articles. This is the solution SciELO offers to overcome the problem of accessibility and visibility that affects scientific journals from developing countries.

- SciELO national sites automatically establish the bibliographical control of national scientific literature. The SciELO methodology includes the markup of the bibliographical elements in the articles full texts based on SGML DTDs, so that the SciELO databases incorporate the referential bibliographic record as an integral part of the full texts. This feature permits the creation and operation of national indexes. It also permits to export bibliographical records  to international indexes, accelerating the availability of the article to the international community; an experience is being carried out to export bibliographical records from SciELO database to United States National Library PubMed. In addition, it is also possible to generate dynamic links from the text elements to external national and international databases, enriching the browse of the texts.

- SciELO national sites automatically establish control of the access to the library as whole and, individually, to journal titles, issues and articles. In addition, it is possible to produce standard bibliometric indicators, including those based on citations as produced by ISI. Consequently, national scientific authorities, publishers, editors, authors, analysts etc. may have access to the statistics of usage and impact of national scientific literature to support scientometric and informetric studies, as well as to support policies on scientific communications. At the same time, the establishment of comparative analysis among countries is also expected to arise.

- SciELO national sites are intended to become the depositary of scientific electronic journals. The application of SciELO in different countries will help the development of policies and procedures towards the preservation of electronic journals.

Taking into account our experience with the SciELO Project, we would like to recommend that UNESCO, ICSU and other international organizations express their support to SciELO and other similar initiatives that envisage the establishement of common methodologies and standards that facilitate developing countries to operate affordable electronic publishing in a compatible way with developed countries initiatives.