OLIVA: The scientific production indexed in Latin America and the Caribbean. Disciplinary diversity, institutional collaboration, and multilingualism in SciELO and Redalyc (1995-2018)

Abstract

This article presents the results of the Latin American Observatory of Evaluation Indicators (OLIVA, its Spanish acronym) which works to raise the visibility of the scientific production indexed in Latin America and the Caribbean, and to enhance its value for research assessment. This study deals with the production published in open access by journals indexed in SciELO and Redalyc, based on a deduplicated database of a total of 908,982 documents and 2,591,704 authors. It highlights the magnitude of this production and describes its disciplinary diversity, as well as trends in national, regional, and international research collaboration. It also examines the publishers of the 1,720 journals that make up the database of journals from 15 countries and highlights the predominance of universities and public institutions in this regional circuit. The journals that operate with the APC model are analyzed, confirming a clearly lower influence of this model compared to what is observed in other continents, although Brazil is identified as the country with the greatest incidence of this practice in the region. Finally, collaboration between states in Brazil, analyzed with SciELO data, proves to be highly significant, strongly challenging the traditional interpretation of co-authorship among researchers from the same country as academic inbreeding. The study concludes that these journals show multi-scalar circulation, a linguistic diversity, and a disciplinary breadth that can very effectively serve the current needs of scholarly communication in times of open science.

Spanish version: https://doi.org/10.1590/SciELOPreprints.2653