One of the great dilemmas for editors of scientific journals: to charge or not to charge, that is the question!

Photo of a dollar bill on a white table with seven coins on it.

The issue of charging publication fees has been haunting editors and authors. Contrary to what it may seem, there doesn’t seem to be any appreciation or recognition on the part of researchers in favor of journals that have made a great effort not to charge any fees and to make articles available free of charge. Read More →

SciELO as a space for thinking through scholarly communication

SciELO 25 Years logo

Understanding SciELO as a place to think through scholarly communication allows us to address new challenges for publishers, such as artificial intelligence. SciELO has an ethical component, a technological component and, at its core, a concern for the people who make up the scholarly communication community. Read More →

Revista DADOS creates special editorial office on replicability

Photograph of a hand holding a cassette tape against a blue background.

As of this year, Revista DADOS will have an editorial department specifically set up to deal with issues of the replicability of its articles. This commitment included a break with essayism in favor of a more systematic research view, which led to the publication of manuscripts strongly supported by empirical evidence. Read More →

Executive summary: SciELO 25 Years Meeting – Open Science with IDEIA

SciELO 25 Years logo

Various stakeholders met and outlined several key points for the advancement of Open Science in Latin America. These included strengthening the governance of the SciELO Network and aligning it with open science practices, the use of AI tools and resources in research communication and the creation of an Office of Ethics and Good Practices in Scholarly Communication. Read More →

Some thoughts on SciELO 25 Years

SciELO 25 Years logo

The topics covered during the event form a very rich agenda full of challenges for the coming years. We are confident that these challenges will be met satisfactorily on the basis of SciELO’s track record. The Declaration approved at this event touches on the main points of this challenge and we hope that the actors urged in this declaration will fulfill their role in advancing Open Science in the Region. Read More →

The South African Journal of Science (SAJS) and the goals of accessibility, inclusion and change

Print screen of a slide that says "The South African Journal of Science (SAJS) and the goals of accessibility, inclusion and change: A conversation between Prof Leslie Swartz, Editor-in-Chief of SAJS, and Dr Nkosinathi Madondo, associate editor intern of SAJS"

A conversation between Prof Leslie Swartz, Editor-in-Chief of the South African Journal of Science (SAJS), and Dr Nkosinathi Madondo, associate editor mentee of SAJS. Read More →

Artificial Intelligence and research communication

Watercolor of Alan Turing generated by Midjourney AI

Are chatbots really authors of scientific articles? Can they be legally responsible, make ethical decisions? What do scientific societies, journal editors and universities say? Can their results be included in original scientific articles? Based on recent contributions hereby presented, we’ll be publishing posts that will try to answer these questions and any new ones that arise. Read More →

GPT, machine translation, and how good they are: a comprehensive evaluation

Schematic showing the direct translation and transfer translation pyramid.

Generative artificial intelligence models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities for natural language generation, but their performance for machine translation has not been thoroughly investigated. A comprehensive evaluation of GPT models for translation is presented, compared to state-of-the-art commercial and research systems, including NMT, tested with texts in 18 languages. Read More →

Uncited articles and the dispersion of citations in the scientific literature

Map of co-citation prepared by the authors with the VOSviewer software.

Questioning Bradford’s law, whose interpretation in bibliometrics states that most citations are concentrated in a few journals and articles, a recent study highlights the importance of uncited articles and their influence on citation concentration. For the authors, uncited articles should be included in the analysis to provide a more comprehensive understanding of citation patterns across time, disciplines, and geographic regions. Read More →

Some remarks on peer review and preprints [Originally published as the editorial in Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz vol. 118]

Montage. Photo of a data center, a corridor with machines occupying the wall and processing computer systems. In front, a vector illustration of a microscope and a cross behind. A braided circle around the two. At the top, the logo of the journal Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz. At the bottom, the text: Peer Review x Preprint.

We may say that scientific publishing is now living under the “disruption of preprints”! Scientific editors must now think about two things: (i) a new concept of “publishing papers”, and (ii) how to proper (and innovatively) evaluate the contribution these freshly released papers might bring to society. Read More →

Editora Fiocruz Bio Collection: innovative themes and dynamics

"Coleção Bio" logo.

Not by chance, “Tópicos em Virologia” is the first volume of the Bio collection, an innovative movement of Editora Fiocruz, welcoming the initiative of the biomedical community of Fiocruz and partners. The Bio collection is the bet of many collective layers. The proposal is to keep the content permanently updated – and online access is open. The themes aim to occupy niches hitherto lacking content in Portuguese. Milton Ozório Moraes, em>in memorian, a great enthusiast of collective initiatives and dissemination of knowledge, is one of the parents of this collection. Available in Portuguese only. Read More →

Reproduction and replication in scientific research – part 3

Screenshot from the film Maniac (1934), public domain. A character looks at glassware on a countertop.

Reproducibility and replicability are central issues when discussing the reliability of scientific research. The attempt by a second researcher to replicate a previous study is an effort to determine whether applying the same methods to the same scientific question produces similar results. In the social sciences and humanities, however, it is not the same paradigms. Read More →

Reproduction and replication in scientific research – part 2

Screenshot from the public domain film Maniac (1934). The camera is out of focus and showing Horace B. Carpenter as the character "Dr. Meirschultz" behind lab equipment.

In this second note on the subject, we will address the guidelines proposed in 2019 by NASEM. We will analyze how replicability is understood in different scientific disciplines, mainly in the experimental sciences, based on a computational paradigm. Likewise, we will look at opinions from other disciplines related to social sciences and medicine, which do not participate in the same epistemological paradigms. Read More →

Walking the walk: open communication and review in a congress on open science

Black and white photograph of people walking in a courtyard, with a superimposed illustration of a net in red.

The first Iberoamerican Congress for Open Science took place on 23 and 24 November 2022, as a forum for Iberoamerican dialogue on the right to science and to promote change in how we understand science, from an inclusive, open, participatory, and responsible perspective. Read More →

Reproduction and replication in scientific research – part 1

Screenshot from the public domain films Maniac (1934) showing Horace B. Carpenter as the character "Dr. Meirschultz"

Replicability is a central issue when discussing the reliability of scientific research that renews itself in the promotion of open science. A second researcher’s attempt to replicate an earlier study is an effort to determine whether applying the same methods to the same scientific question yields similar results. Read More →