Interface - Comunicação, Saúde, Educação at the 15th anniversary of the SciELO network

EDITORIAL

Interface - Comunicação, Saúde, Educação at the 15^th anniversary of the SciELO network

The editors of scientific journals in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain, Portugal and South Africa have had much to commemorate this years: the 15 years of intense activity and expansion of the SciELO network of national libraries with open access to the most important scientific journals of the countries that form part of this network. Over this short space of time, the SciELO network has become a worldwide reference point for open-access publication, as was highlighted by all the guests from many countries who had been invited to participate in the event commemorating its 15^th anniversary, which was held in São Paulo last October.

Our journal was created just a few months before SciELO and, after entering the SciELO Brazil library in 2005, it achieved growth of submissions of almost 500% in only three years. This change represented an enormous organizational challenge for our editorial work in its different stages, from assessing the scientific merit to producing the graphical-textual layout for each edition. The growth of submissions has been maintained and, this year, we have already surpassed the record milestone of 800 submissions, of which around 700 are original articles.

Over these eight years in which Interface has been present in the SciELO Brazil library, our challenge has been to follow along with the proposals for improvement of scientific communication that it has presented. Thus, to reduce costs and time periods between submission and publication, we have started to use the online editorial management systems that are made available by the library (SciELO Submission, initially, and ScholarOne, from 2013) and ahead-of-print publication of approved articles. More recently, we have started to publish press releases of articles published in our blog and also in SciELO's Human Sciences blog, which was launched during the 15^th anniversary conference, and now in the next edition, on our page of SciELO Brazil. At the same time, Interface's most recent presence (in the social networks of blogs, Facebook and Twitter) also results from efforts made by SciELO among journal editors of the network, aimed at increasing the visibility of what has been published, not only within the scientific community but also among the broader public, thereby seeking a greater social impact.

The recent selection of the journal Interface to form part of the SciELO Public Health collection, which is a thematic collection within the SciELO network, is another achievement that we wish to share with our collaborators. This collection brings together 15 journals within this field, of which four are Brazilian. With the entry of our periodical into this collection, the Brazilian production within the field of Social and Human Healthcare Sciences will attain greater international visibility. Integration into this database will take place in 2014, since it will require changing the bibliographic standards from ABNT to Vancouver.

To expand the international diffusion of what we have published in our journal (as commented previously), in 2013 we started to subsidize the English-language translation of a proportion of the articles published, as part of the efforts to broaden the international dissemination of Brazilian scientific production.

For the coming year, we will have other challenges ahead of us, among which the biggest is to professionalize the editorial work. To achieve this aim, it will be necessary to seek stable and sufficient public funding, given that we dismiss the possibility of charging authors for submission and/or publication of manuscripts. In this regard, we have great expectations from the "Project to improve the management and the editing and publishing services of Brazilian public health journals", which is coordinated by SciELO and ABRASCO and is supported by the Ministry of Health. It is hoped that, through the coordinated and interlinked efforts of these two institutions in relation to journals within the field, we will be able to ensure increasing professionalization of our editorial work.

Antonio Pithon Cyrino, Lilia Blima Schraiber, Miriam Foresti

Editors

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  23 Jan 2014
• Date of issue
  Dec 2013