This research comparatively analyses the coverage of publications indexed in SciELO in OpenAlex, WoS, Scopus and Dimensions databases. DOIs from SciELO publications were used to study their coverage in the selected databases. We found that 68% of publications indexed in SciELO have DOI, with progressive growth over the years. There are discrepancies in the number of DOIs per SciELO collection, ranging from 99% in SciELO Brazil to less than 5% in other countries. Coverage of SciELO publications with DOIs is high in Dimensions (95%) and OpenAlex (93%) and low in Scopus (57%) and WoS (33%). There is a need to look for ways to improve the large-scale availability of SciELO data. These improvements could represent the tipping point for the SciELO database to become an open research scientometric infrastructure in its own right.