In 2013 the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) program achieved 15 years of regular operation with a sound record of achievements related to its raison d’être with functions that cover the indexing, aggregating, publishing and interoperating of open access collections of peer reviewed academic journals, published by institutions from Ibero-American countries and South Africa. The collections are multidisciplinary and multilingual. Most of the journals are independently managed either by scientific societies or academic institutions, with the rare presence of commercial publishers. The creation of SciELO 15 years ago and its further development were driven by two innovative and pioneering approaches: first, the in dexing of national quality journals to complement international in dexes and the publication of the full texts with free access on the Web in the modality known today as the “Golden Road”, which took place about four years before the launch of the Budapest Declaration that is internationally agreed to as the beginning of the Open Access movement; and, second, the cooperative convergence of independent publishers, editors and national research agencies around a common objective to increase the visibility and quality of journals (Packer 1998; Meneghini, 2003; Packer 2009). During this development, SciELO became a standard of quality for the journals it indexes. As of June 2013, the SciELO network covers 15 Ibero-American countries plus South Africa, with each country publishing a national collection of journals in the network. There are also two multinational thematic collections in the network. Together these countries index about one thousand journal titles that publish more than 40 thousand articles per year. To date, the network has published a total of more than 400 thousand open access articles that receive a daily average of over 1.5 million article downloads, 65% as PDF files and 35% as HTML files.The wide presence of SciELO on the Web is evidenced by different metrics systems, such as the Ranking Web of Repositories whose July 2013 edition positions the SciELO Brazil collection portal in first place, and the SciELO collections of Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Spain in the top 20 portals (Aguillo 2014). The SciELO network is the major provider of journals indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The majority of Latin American journals indexed by the Web of Science and Scopus are open access and most of them are SciELO journals. No other region in the world has this level of adoption of open access journals indexed in ternationally (Miguel, Chinchilla-Rodríguez and Moya-Anegón 2011). SciELO is a special program of the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) that provides political and financial support to the development of the SciELO Brazil collection that in teroperates with the other SciELO national and thematic collections, and provides the on-going maintenance of the methodological and technological platform. SciELO Brazil also acts as the network techni cal secretariat. Each of the SciELO national collections is managed and funded by its corresponding national research institution. All collections follow the same operating methodology and technology.