Open access editorial policies of SciELO health sciences journals

Abstract

SciELO promotes open access and cooperative publication of scholarly journals, based mainly in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal. SciELO was created to offer solutions to increase the visibility of participating journals and facilitate free access to their full texts. This work aims to analyse the open access editorial policies implemented by the health sciences journals of the SciELO network (411 journals at the time of this study) in terms of authors’ rights, copyright issues, self-archiving policies and openness. From SciELO health sciences journals network, 92% of the 411 journals use a Creative Commons licence, 89% require transfer of author copyright and 14% apply author processing charges. According to the past SHERPA/RoMEO taxonomy of self-archiving policies, 8.5% of the journals were classified as white, 81.5% blue and 10% green. The openness of journals calculated through the Open Access Spectrum approach was higher than 60% in more than 80% of the total journals. Out of the 411 journals in SciELO portals, 380 have their own website. Discrepancies were found between licences stated in SciELO compared with the ones used in their websites, mainly due to the lack of declared licences in either of the two sources or because the licences did not match. The licences used on the websites and in SciELO were also compared with their corresponding records in the Directory of Open Access Journals and Crossref, and again the differences were narrowly related to the data supplier.