Category: Analysis

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 →

Output and impact of Brazilian research: confronting international and national contexts

Brazilian scientific research, seen through its articles and their impact reveals a scenario that 30 years ago could not have been described. SciELO concretizes what Garfield envisioned for Latin America in the 1990s, allowing to delineate the citation flow, as in many countries, as yet unseen, and allowing to question the pertinence of Gibbs’s expression: “lost science in the third world”. Read More →

The basics of content types: Preprints, Crossmark, translations, and more

What’s the difference between preprints and ahead of print? When should you use each; and, what are the DOI requirements? This article answers those questions and provides a basic overview of how to connect the metadata records of related content types, like translations. Read More →

Do the article and scientific journals have a future?

How to think the future of scholarly communication, aiming at its broadest circulation, use, citation, and impact? It is proposed to preferentially focus on meeting the needs of the “Great Dialogue” in knowledge production and less on the financing and survival strategies of canonical forms of scholarly communication before the disruptive effects of open access. Read More →

Towards universal open access? Why we need bibliodiversity rather than a “silver bullet”

The current debate on open access is often based on undue generalizations advocating for “silver bullet” models to flip the scholarly communication system globally. This approach is flawed because it doesn’t take into account the diversity of communication practices across the different disciplines and countries. Read More →

Book Review: Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age by Matthew J. Salganik [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in July/2018]

In Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age, Matthew J. Salganik explores the process of undertaking social research in the digital era, examining a wide range of concepts while also offering teaching activities and materials. In bringing together the expertise of social and data scientists to the benefit of both, this is a comprehensive overview of new approaches to social research in our time, recommends Marziyeh Ebrahimi. 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 →

The critical role of the DOI

Find out why URL links to research articles are fragile, and how DOIs are essential in building stable, persistent links between research objects. This is achieved through the metadata that members deposit with Crossref, as part of their obligations. Learn how we can all contribute to creating a global, robust research record. Read More →

Journals’ presence and impact on the social web: Towards the social media impact factor

The routine practice of evaluating the journal Impact Factor to determine where to submit a manuscript has been reconsidered to the detriment of the social impact of the journal in the relationship that the journal establishes with the scientific community and the public. Social media metrics act in this direction by measuring the journal social media impact factor which may assist in managing the journals’ web presence in the profiles kept on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Read More →

Scientific-public interface in times of correction of scientific literature: Contemporary ethical issues

The process of correcting scientific literature becomes increasingly accelerated and reflects, among several factors, a greater scrutiny by scientific publishers. Unlike what happened about two decades ago, when retracting an article was rare, today it has been integrated into the editorial culture. In this context, the way in which this correction process is articulated with the news flow about science deserves attention. In the science-public interface, retractions broaden the spaces to strengthen public understanding about science and its mechanisms of self-regulation. How to extend this space is one of the ethical discussions of our time. Read More →

What does a new approach mean (for journals, research councils)?

Preprints are a development underway in science communication and publishing. For journals, this has consequences. They may adopt a passive role, an opposing stance, or an encouraging, stimulating role, and see it as an opportunity, placing their journal in the midst of the preprint development. These are issues to be discussed in detail at the SciELO 20 Years Conference in September 2018. Read More →

Why Crossref exists and persists

In today’s world, an author’s work needs a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for it to become discoverable, citable, and linkable. This unique alphanumeric string identifies the content of a research work, and remains associated with it irrespective of changes to its web location. Discover the origins of the DOI, how Crossref was founded, and why they continue to exist and persist. Read More →

Geo for All – Open Principles in GeoEducation and Science

Central to Geo for All mission is the belief that knowledge is a public good and Open Principles in Education will provide great opportunities for everyone. The key ingredients that make Open Geospatial Science possible are enshrined in Open Principles, i.e: Open Source geospatial software, Open data, Open standards, Open educational resources, and Open access to research publications. Read More →

How long does it take to do science? The emergence of time in scholarly communication

Scholarly communication has undergone great transformations in the last two decades, mainly due to the popularization of new information technologies, which imposes a new regime of time and speed in scientific publishing. However, these changes are not just responses to technological advances. These are more complex issues related to the reconfiguration of academic work and changes on the paradigm of communication and the difficulties and challenges faced by editors and researchers over time management. Read More →

Scientific Data Management – from collection to preservation

Proper management of data used in scientific research has become a mandatory part of good research practices. The Open Science era has revolutionized scientific methodology, motivating the emergence of new lines of research in all areas of knowledge. This post describes some challenges of this management from the computational point of view. Read More →