Editage at the SciELO15 Years Conference in Brazil

In October 2013, Donald Samulack, President, U.S. operations at Editage, attended the SciELO 15 Years Conference held to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the SciELO Network. Editage was one of the sponsors of the event, which was held from October 22-25 at the Intercontinental Hotel in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The conference attracted a daily footfall of 400 academicians, including editors, publishers, researchers, and authors. The primary focus of the conference was on open access publishing and the challenges currently faced by journals. The panel of speakers at the conference included Donald Samulack.

Donald presented an interesting session titled Can an Author’s Editor Help Expedite Peer Review of the Manuscript They Edit? as part of the panel on “Experiences, Solutions, Products, and Services of Scientific Communication.” In his session, Donald emphasized that getting an editor to perform a pre-submission linguistic review of articles would not only benefit ESL (English as a second language) authors but would also likely expedite the peer-review process, thereby simplifying the workflow of the journal editing process. Professionals from various sectors of the scientific communications industry also visited the Editage booth, where they were able to engage in discussions with Donald as well as our Brazilian representatives. Given Editage’s focus on enabling effective scientific communication and on providing increased access to scientific knowledge, the conference helped Editage initiate a dialogue on some of the best practices in scientific publishing.

Open Access emerged as the dominant theme throughout the event and was discussed by speakers in 59 sessions. Other areas of discussion were the future growth of the SciELO platform, trends in contemporary scholarly communication, and new tools and techniques that have the potential to shape scientific research and its communication. The increasing importance of social networking platforms in scientific communication and the emergence of new metrics to evaluate the impact of publications based on the influence of social networking platforms were also discussed.

Editage’s participation in this event broadened our understanding of the general direction of Open Access platforms as well as their expansion in the countries of the SciELO network and a consideration of the role we could play in improving the quality of published research and facilitating the processes of journal editors.

SciELO: SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is an Open Access platform that includes a selected collection of journal articles. Thus far, over 400,000 articles have been published on this platform and over 1,000 journals from 12 countries have been indexed on it.