The Brazilian SciELO is updating its inclusion criteria. There are of course half a dozen other SciELO aggregators around South and Central America, but Brazil’s is the biggest.
According to the English-language summary, to stay in after 2020 the indexed journal must…
* accept for consideration articles “that are posted in a preprint server”
* be “citing and referencing all data, software codes and other content underlying the article’s texts”
* have in place “options for opening peer review”
No. 1 sounds good, and might be usefully extended to blog posts that included part of what later became an article.
No. 2 may be a bit problematic for those who rely on big closed computer-models, but I guess that simply “citing” that the model (presumably) exists may be deemed good enough. But it would be nice if SciELO required that the link should always lead to the full public data or model.
No. 3 appears to leave “opening” curiously unspecified. What options are acceptable, and by what criteria will a journal be judged to have engaged in “opening” its peer review? And how will this impact perfectly valid small single-editor journals in the arts and humanities? In which, for instance, the editor is the world-expert on the niche topic and single-handedly does a ‘light-touch’ peer-review on the year’s articles? Will they be forced to take on a new Peer Review Board, and then run and chase it, or else leave the Brazilian SciELO?