Worldwide outlook of geology journals: challenges in South America

Abstract

South American scientific periodicals are regarded as obscure due to their low visibility and difficult access. In an increasingly web-dependent world, the result is that a large amount of science produced locally in South America is ignored. How are globalization trends in scientific publications impacting on South American geology? A survey of nearly 400 geological journals and serial publications in South America was carried out to evaluate their present situation, with respect to publication status, publishers, periodicity and regularity, indexing and on-line access. Publications produced by societies are usually regular and timely and of relatively high quality. Publications from government organizations are mostly irregular in appearance and prone to frequent name changes that complicate bibliographic searches. South American Earth Science journals are rather poorly represented in international databases and abstracting services, but they fare better in regional databases, such as Latindex and Periodica. There are two large regional enterprises which provide free on-line access to some of the best journals: SciELO and Red ALyC, but the participation of Earth Science journals in these is still low. Many institutional web-sites make their own journals available immediately after printing, and there are a few fully electronic journals. Almost all on-line access is free and unrestricted, unlike that in the developed world where costs for access can be very high.