How the largest open access portal in the world for scientific journals is using Python.

Fabio Batalha, Gustavo Fonseca, Jamil Atta, ROBERTA TAKENAKA

Audience level:
Novice
Category:
Education

Description

SciELO is the largest open access portal of scientific journals in the world, according to Webometrics indicators. It is present as regional instances in all Latin America, Spain, Portugal and South Africa. Since 2010, SciELO has adopted Python as its major programming language. By the means of this poster, will be shown why and how Python is playing a big role in the recent software development efforts.

Abstract

SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library On-line) is a brazilian project developed in 1997 and sponsored by FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) the funding agency of the state of São Paulo.

Considered the biggest open access portal in the world according to Webometrics indicators (http://repositories.webometrics.info/en/top_portals), it is present in all Latin America countries, Spain, Portugal and South Africa, totalizing more than 1.100 journals, 460.000 scientific articles and 10.000.000 citations. Speaking strictly about the brazilian instance (www.scielo.br), the total of accesses is over 1.2 millions page views per day.

Since 2010, Python has being adopted as the major programming language for new developments and is also rapidly growing among the legacy software.

In this poster we want to show you, in macro terms, the new software architecture of SciELO, heavily based on Python frameworks, libraries and open source policies.