SciELO Network provides Open Access (OA) to journals’ contents. Journals are organized in national and thematic collections. Each collection is managed by a nationally recognized research organization. Selection of journals to be indexed in and discontinued of a collection is of entire responsibility of each collection management organization, usually with the support of a scientific advisory committee.

Journals’ contents comprise research articles, review articles, research related communications, case studies, editorials and other type of texts that are generally identified as documents whose selection and publication is of entire responsibility of journals. The documents themselves are of entire responsibility of the authors and the journals that published them. SciELO does not own any responsibility on documents’ contents.

The formalization of the Open Access at collection, journal and document levels is fulfilled through the specification of an access attribution of the Creative Commons (CC) system that promote reuse and distribution of journal documents.

The CC-BY license is adopted by SciELO indexing criteria as the standard OA attribution since 2015. Journals indexed before 2015 may keep their original license but are encouraged to adopt CC-BY to make use of all SciELO interoperability and dissemination services. Journals indexed after 2015 are required to adopt the CC-BY license.

According to the Creative Commons license definitions, CC–BY 4.0 “lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.” (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/?lang=en, 22 April 2019)

For more information on Creative Commons licensing see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/?lang=en and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license.