SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is not a commercial publisher but a cooperative open-access publishing platform and indexing program. Founded in São Paulo in 1997 by FAPESP (the São Paulo Research Foundation) in partnership with BIREME/PAHO, it went live in 1998 with a pilot of Brazilian journals and has grown into a network of more than 2,100 journals listed across national collections in Latin America, Spain, Portugal, and South Africa. Everything on SciELO is free to read, and - unusually in scholarly publishing - most journals are also free to publish in, because costs are covered by public research funders, universities, and scholarly societies.

If you work on topics with a Latin American, Iberian, or African dimension - public health, tropical medicine, agriculture, education, regional social science - SciELO journals are often the venues where the most relevant peer community actually reads and cites. This guide explains how the network is organized, what it costs (usually nothing), how peer review and submission work, and how to check indexing before you commit.

SciELO is a network of independent journals grouped into national collections, so "submitting to SciELO" really means submitting to a specific journal in a specific collection. Use the table below to orient yourself.

Three things at once:

• A publishing platform. Journals adopt the SciELO Publishing Schema (a JATS-based XML standard) and are hosted on the national collection sites, with full text in HTML and PDF, DOIs, and long-term preservation.
• A quality-controlled index. Each national collection has admission criteria - peer review, editorial board standards, publication regularity, and open-access compliance - so admission to a SciELO collection is itself a quality signal, similar in spirit to DOAJ listing.
• A network of national programs. 16+ country collections (Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Cuba, Venezuela, Spain, Portugal, South Africa) plus thematic initiatives, coordinated from Brazil and funded largely by national science agencies.

SciELO does not own the journals. Each title belongs to a university, scholarly society, or research institute, keeps its own editorial board, and makes its own acceptance decisions.

SciELO was an open-access pioneer - it made Latin American research free to read years before the Budapest Open Access Initiative - and it remains fully OA today.

Because there is no subscription side, concepts like hybrid OA, transformative agreements, and Read & Publish deals simply do not apply to SciELO.

Every journal admitted to a SciELO collection must operate peer review; the model (single-anonymized, double-anonymized, or open) is set per journal. SciELO's program guidelines have pushed the network toward open-science practices - it encourages open peer review, data availability statements, and preprint acceptance. Turnaround varies widely: well-resourced flagship titles decide in a few months, while smaller society journals can be slower. Check the journal's own site for current expectations.

1. Find the right journal. Browse the collection lists at scielo.org (by subject or alphabetically), or search SciSpace for the title's metrics and templates.
2. Check language policy. Many SciELO journals accept Portuguese, Spanish, and English; a growing share publish English versions in parallel.
3. Read the instructions to authors. Citation style varies - many Brazilian titles use ABNT, most medical titles use Vancouver, and others use APA.
4. Submit via the journal's own system. Most SciELO journals run Open Journal Systems (OJS) hosted by their collection or institution; a few use other platforms. There is no central SciELO submission portal for journals.
5. Consider a preprint. You can deposit in SciELO Preprints before or alongside submission; most network journals accept preprinted manuscripts.

Admission to SciELO puts a journal in the SciELO Citation Index, which has been integrated into the Web of Science platform since Thomson Reuters added it in 2013-2014. Many SciELO titles are additionally indexed in Scopus, PubMed/MEDLINE (for biomedical journals), DOAJ, and Redalyc - but coverage is per title, not automatic. If indexing matters for your evaluation system, verify the specific journal in the Web of Science Master Journal List and Scopus before submitting.

SciELO's program guidelines require journals to follow COPE-aligned publication-ethics practices, and the network publishes its own guides on ethics, retractions, and preprint withdrawal. National collections audit member journals periodically and can delist titles that stop meeting the criteria. The platform's public, criteria-based admission process is one reason SciELO listing is widely treated as a legitimacy marker for regional journals.