This new online portal is the most important space to access the scientific production of the Universidad de La Frontera.

The Office of Libraries and Information Resources (DIBRI) of the Universidad de La Frontera (UFRO) launched the online portal of academic journals, a new digital space that is meant to function as a unified and standardized access to all scientific journals developed at this university. The portal can be accessed through the website revistas.ufro.cl or through the website of the unit.

“The Office of Libraries and Information Resources now also supports the work of the scientific journals of the university, as it also is the case at other important institutions for higher education in the world. Our purpose is to turn this unit into a legitimate internal interlocutor by specializing in the access and administration of top-level scientific production,” Dr. Carlos del Valle, the director of the Office of Libraries and Information Resources at the UFRO, said, and also thanked everyone who has been part of the development of this project.

The website has been developed by the Office of Libraries and Information Resources within the framework of a Conicyt (Chilean Commission for Scientific and Technological Research) Project and includes three scientific journals: Journal of Soil Science and Plant Nutrition, Cubo. A Mathematical Journal, and Perspectivas de la Comunicación (Perspectives of Communication). In this regard, Dr. Alex Seguel, who is in charge of the project, explained: “This project has been financed by the Fund for the Publication of Science Journals of the Conicyt Program for Scientific Information. The idea was to strengthen three scientific journals of the Universidad de La Frontera through the increase of their international visibility, of the quality of the papers and to strengthen the publishing entities by improving the strategies of publication, especially by using the journal management and publishing system Open Journal System.”

The Open Journal System (OJS) has been developed to expand and improve the access to research and allows to control the whole publication process, from the dispatch of the manuscripts, the revision by peers, the correction, diagramming, publication, indexing of the data bases and search engines, to the open access for any user.

THE JOURNALS

The recently launched online portal already contains fifteen journals of different fields of knowledge and even some historical publications, which have been recovered and digitalized for this purpose. It is a documentary and historical heritage that is now available for all users of the internet.

According to the librarian Nicole Drouilly and the computer engineer Cristian Martínez, who have presented the characteristics of the portal and the way it works, the purpose is to nurture it with new publications that are going to be developed or already exist within the university. “It is in our interest that the editors and our team use the OJS tool. Therefore, we will make sure that they get the support they need. Some of the journals that are on the online portal are also on SciELO and other sites. In coordination with the editors, we care about including or duplicating them in this system, what will allow us to improve the communication and to make visible that they come from our university,” the librarian Nicole Drouilly explained.

At the launching ceremony the director of the Scientific and Technological Bioresource Nucleus (BIOREN), Dr. Maria de la Luz Mora, was also present and said: “Since we started this project together, the idea has always been to get where we are now, with our work reflected on the online portal, having all publications in one place, visible for the whole world, thanks to this great initiative of DIBRI.”

The editor of “Cubo. A Mathematical Journal”, Dr. Ruby Rodríguez, also referred to the online portal as “an excellent initiative” and added that they “have been working with the journal for a long time. We are very glad that we were able to establish this group within the university and that we could bring our scientific production together at one place.”

Cubo is one of the oldest journals of the university and “thanks to this initiative, we were able to digitalize all articles since 1986 and to increase their visibility within the national and international mathematical community, what leads to more and better articles,” Dr. Ruben Sanchez, who was part of the initial coordination team and presented the origin of the online portal, explained.