Criteria for acceptance into / and remaining part of the SciELO SA Collection:

Inclusion in the SciELO SA collection is by invitation, based on the recommendations of the ASSAf Peer Review Reports.

For a journal to be invited to be included in the SciELO SA collection it needs to meet the following criteria:

1. The Journal needs to be a South African journal accredited by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET).

2. Have received a positive peer review evaluation from the relevant ASSAf Peer Review Panel.

3. The journal must have an online ISSN that has been registered on the ISSN portal. Check here - https://portal.issn.org/.

4. Publish open accessibly, i.e., there is no cost for or embargo on full-text articles and ASSAf may harvest the PDFs of articles from the journal’s website for e-publication on the SciELO SA platform.

5. The journal needs to have its own website where an archive of the journal issues is available. The archive needs to be clearly organised and accessible.

6. The primary website of the journal needs to be open access.

7. Publish regularly and on time according to its stated publication frequency, and throughout the year. Where a journal publishes continuously at least two articles need to be sent to SciELO by end-March, 2+ articles by the end of June, another 2+ by the end of September and another 2+ by mid-December.

8. Publish at least 10 original articles per year, depending on the subject area.

9. Be willing to sign a Publisher's Agreement with ASSAf. 

10. Include Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) in the PDFs in articles and texts and ensure the DOIs are deposited. 

11. Include the  ORCIDs and detailed affiliations of all authors in the PDFs of all original articles.

12. Affiliations of authors need to include the unit, department or school the author works in, as well as the organisation, the city and country of each author (e.g. Prof John Smith, ORCID link, Department of History, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa). 

13. All articles must include an English title, English abstract, and English keywords.

14. State the journal’s Creative Commons licence e.g., CC-BY 4.0 on the journal’s webpage.

15. Provide proof of the journal’s application for inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

16. The journal needs to clearly state its ethics policy on its webpage and the journal needs to clearly indicate its focus on scientific integrity.

17. The journal needs to provide a clear description of its type of peer review and the processes it follows on its webpage.

Where journals adhere to all the above criteria and have somehow been omitted from inclusion, the editor is welcome to send an email to the Operations Manager, Louise van Heerden: louise@assaf.org.za.