Sustainability of Latin American initiatives that publish open access journals using the XML-JATS standard: the case SciELO

Objectives: It is performed a sustainability analysis of the Latin American initiative scielo.org based on two main aspects, the economic and the need for its existence. Method: To achieve that, the required man-hours to publish a scientific paper were measured, using its new publication methodology called XML SPS. 40 articles published in scientific journals of different areas of knowledge are processed; journals from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, using that methodology. Results showed that the preparation of the document takes on average 35% of the total time (sigma = 9.72%), while the tagging process takes on average 50% of the time (sigma = 8.50%), finally the sections corresponding to references, acknowledgments and appendices (back) takes the majority of the time. Conclusions: This analysis indicates that the SciELO publishing model is sustainable from the point of view of the need for its existence, but in the economic terms seems not to be fully sustainable for all countries in the region, because it is a technically complex process that not all publishers are able to perform, making outsourcing of that procedure to be necessary, which requires a greater budget for the journal that can jeopardize the sustainability and the control of this publishing model.