Editorial

The inclusion of Orinoquia in SciELO: a new step towards excellence

Agustín Góngora Orjuela

MV. MSc. Dr. Sci, Editor Orinoquia.

Orinoquia's recent inclusion in the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) represents a new step on the way towards obtaining the maximum classification in the Colombian bibliographic index (Publindex). SciELO was conceived as an electronic library forming an integral part of a project being run between the Fundación de Apoyo a la Investigación del Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) and the Centro Latinoamericano y del Caribe de Información en Ciencias de la Salud (originally named Biblioteca Regional de Medicina - BIREME). The project's success undoubtedly came from having had the support of the Brazilian Consejo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (CNPq) since its beginning.

The need for developing a common methodology for preparing, broadcasting, storing and evaluating scientific literature in electronic form was this project's main objective. It has now become extended to 8 countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Portugal, Spain and Venezuela) and has led to initiatives aimed at forming links with another 5 (Costa Rica, México, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay).

SciELO's great acceptance, especially by Latin-American countries, lies in it being a tool having the power to provide greater awareness for research, this not having been possible for journals included in databases having greater prestige such as the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and SciVerse Scopus (Elsevier). The work done by SciELO currently speaks for itself: it contains 907 journals and 354,047 articles, covers 24,056 topics and has been quoted 7,473,758 times. Regarding countries' participation in SciELO, Colombia is represented by 121 journals, thereby showing the advances made concerning the quality of Colombian journals.

It is worth highlighting that the inclusion of such a high number of journals in SciELO Colombia is the result of ongoing work by the Universidad Nacional's Institute of Public Health which is responsible for managing the platform; such purpose could not have been achieved without its help. We would like to extend our most sincere thanks to all its members.