The need for a comprehensive infrastructure for scholarly publications has been on the European Union’s agenda for a long time. In particular, the European Commission’s open science policy highlights the need for a good database for monitoring Open Access publications in Europe. However, many publications are still missing to rely on a comprehensive information infrastructure on open research. Over the past 10 years, European countries have invested significantly in national infrastructures, and now, at least 20 European countries have a national database for open publication research metadata. However, they are not yet integrated or widely used for cross-country comparisons. … Read More →
Notice to mariners – times have changed
Open access… and everything. Finally, what happened 20 years ago and felt like a utopia of copyright pirates is becoming irreversible, like a tsunami. Publishers and scientific information cannot ignore the theme of open access, so that they can compete and don’t stay out of this market. Things are changing and there’s no going back. … Read More →
What do researchers think about their cultural work environment?
Policies, incentives, evaluation processes, leadership approaches… are they undermining scientific research? A quantitative online survey of more than 4,200 researchers conducted by the Wellcome Trust foundation of the United Kingdom seems to show clear evidence that there are widespread problems in the research culture. Those who finance, publish, evaluate or conduct research can now use this evidence as a starting point to implement solutions. However, are these human management problems with scientific research staff different from other fields of activity, such as work or sports? … Read More →
Google Scholar, Web of Science or Scopus, which gives us better indexing coverage?
Recent analysis of the indexing coverage of the Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus databases shows that higher values do not always mean higher quality or better indexing, as the inclusion of more lower-quality or lower-impact documents may reflect in other aspects of the analysis and, depending on the type of assessment, it should be necessary to eliminate certain types of documents from the citation count. … Read More →
The Open Science Data Librarian expertise
The professional expertise of Data Librarians is expected to rapidly flourish with the advancement of Open Science. This is an innovation, a necessity and an opportunity for the countries of the SciELO Network to create new areas of work for scientific information professionals as part of the alignment of research with open science practices. … Read More →
Accelerating scholarly communication via preprints
There are more than 60 preprint servers worldwide. It seems to be a trend, but the model still has problems and unresolved issues, both in terms of digital preservation and financing and collaboration of its technological solutions. It would be important for funding agencies to find out how to support these proposals. … Read More →
What is Plan U: Universal access to scientific research via preprints?
Plan U proposes that funding agencies require recipients of research funds to publish scholarly communications on preprints servers, regardless of the alternative publication forms that researchers may subsequently make. The initiative could be carried out with a fraction of the current costs and would produce a significant acceleration of the pace of discoveries in the forthcoming years. … Read More →
Journals that increased their APC value received more submissions
One of the expected contributions of Open Access (OA) was to resolve the disproportionate increase of scholarly journals’ subscriptions. Nevertheless, one of the major business models for commercial journal publishing is to charge authors a publication fee known as Article Processing Charge (APC). This rate, in the last five years, has risen more than inflation. However, counterintuitively, it seems that the authors are far from reducing their submissions due to increase of APC values, rather, submissions are increasing, and the more expensive the APC, the more articles the journals have been receiving. … Read More →
From star peer reviewers to ghost peer reviewers – Part II
Open reviews and the emergence of platforms such as Publons, which publish these activities and integrate them into other academic tasks, open the possibility of the emergence of a new aspect of bibliometrics and certainly a new and prestigious market. … Read More →
From star peer reviewers to ghost peer reviewers – Part I
Peer review is an integral part of scholarly publishing and is carried out globally by most researchers in developed countries. To what extent researchers from emerging countries participate and which measures of their performance are reported in the result of the largest survey on peer review conducted so far. This note is the first of two on the subject. … Read More →
Scientific Publishing Innovations: the Future of Journals and Peer Review
On the first day of SciELO 20 Years Week, during the WG5 – Scientific Publishing Innovations and the Future of Peer Review and Journals, new methodologies for opening the publishing process using preprints servers were discussed throughout the day before an audience of more than 50 people and presentations of six experts. Text available only in Spanish. … Read More →
Pirates of the medical literature – a worldwide bibliometric study
A large volume of medical literature is being illegally downloaded in almost every country in the world. There is a significant relationship between the scientific output of these countries and the density of illegal downloads, especially in middle-income countries. This unequal pattern of legal access to medical literature requires the attention of both the publishing industry and policy makers. … Read More →
Administration of research data in France’s CNRS
The paper discussed here presents the results of a national CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) survey answered by 432 directors of public research laboratories in France on the opinions and behavior of experienced scientists about research data management (RDM). … Read More →
What do Spanish researchers think about Open Peer Review?
In February 2018, the Spanish Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas launched a survey to know the habits, preferences and opinions of its researchers when performing an evaluation and being subjected to open peer review, with the aim of contributing to the international debate on science assessment and possible ways of improvement. Fifty-four percent of respondents are satisfied with the dominant peer review system and fifty percent agree to open the reviewers’ identity as it helps reduce conflicts of interest. … Read More →
Books’ relevance in scholarly communication – The case of SciELO Books
Manuscripts were the first repositories of scholarly communication. Over the centuries and new technologies, science has been communicated by books, by personal correspondence between researchers, journals and paper books, until we came to electronic technologies and the Internet. Throughout the 20th century, journals became predominant as a means of communicating research results, with rapid adaptation to the features offered by technological changes. At the SciELO Network Meeting of the SciELO 20 Years Week, a working group will analyze and discuss the relevance of books in scholarly communication, focusing on the progress of academic publishers and, more specifically, the SciELO Books Program. … Read More →
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