SciELO South Africa

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SciELO South Africa is an open-access (free to access and free to publish) searchable database of selected, high quality South African scholarly journals. The project is inspired by a global movement towards the implementation of online journals, pioneered by the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) Network project, founded in Brazil.

By the end of 2024 the collection had grown to 111 titles on the SciELO SA platform. It is expected that at most South African open access journals will eventually be published on the platform. The SciELO SA collection was certified in April 2013 as a regular operational and independent national collection indexed in the SciELO Network Global Portal. This greatly enhances the visibility of South African journals and increases the global impact of our local journals. All SciELO journals appear on the Web of Knowledge (WoK) search portal within the SciELO Citation Index.

Selection and Quality Evaluation of Journal Titles

Inclusion in the SciELO SA collection is by invitation, based on the recommendations of the ASSAf Peer Review Reports.

For a journal to be invited to be considered for inclusion in the SciELO SA collection it needs to meet the following minimum criteria:

  • Must be a South African open access journal
  • Have received a positive peer review evaluation from an ASSAf Peer Review Panel
  • Publish open accessibly, i.e. there is no cost for or embargo on full-text articles and ASSAf may harvest the articles from the journals’ website for e-publication on the SciELO SA platform
  • The primary website of the journal needs to be open access
  • Publish regularly and on time according to the journals’ stated publication frequency
  • Publish 10+ original articles per year depending on the subject area
  • Sign a Publisher’s Agreement with ASSAf
  • Assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to its original articles
  • Include the ORCiDs of the authors of articles.
  • Provide an English title (where necessary) as well as an English abstract and English keywords.
  • Include detailed affiliation details of each author, including the city and country.
  • Apply for inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) as soon as possible.

New best-practice criteria are introduced by the SciELO Network every 5 years. All SciELO SA journals need to adhere to these best-practice over a 5 year period. See: here for the current new criteria to be implemented.

SciELO SA is an automatically accredited index of the DHET. That means that the affected journals need to comply with the conditions, quality checks and stipulated publication policy of the SciELO Index. See here.

The South African Journal of Science, published by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), was the first, peer-reviewed journal to be fully Open Access on the SciELO SA platform. The scholarly journals currently on the SciELO SA platform can be viewed here.

For more information about SciELO SA, please visit the following link: https://sites.google.com/view/assaf-scholarly-pub-resources/scielo-sa

Inclusion in the SciELO SA collection

Where editors believe that their journals adhere to the above criteria and have somehow been omitted from inclusion, they are welcome to send an email to the SciELO SA Operations Manager, Louise van Heerden: louise@assaf.org.za .

Journals Uploaded to SciELO SA

The South African Journal of Science, published by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), was the first, peer-reviewed journal to be fully Open Access on the SciELO SA platform.

The scholarly journals currently on the SciELO SA platform are: