Manifesto signed by scholars and representatives of pro-open access associations, published on the website of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition – SPARC, repudiates the ideas advocated by Jeffrey Beall disqualifying SciELO (and Redalyc) in favor of control over journals by large commercial publishers. The manifesto states that open access is exemplary in Latin America. … Read More →
Unpublished results from clinical trials distort medical research
The ClinicalTrials.gov initiative was created with the purpose to establish a platform for recording information on clinical trials conducted by public organizations (research institutes and government agencies) and private (pharmaceutical companies). A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, however, shows a worrying scenario. Despite the requirement to register clinical trials in a publicly accessible base, a small fraction of them are published in scientific journals, compromising the transparency and applicability of the discoveries. … Read More →
Jeffrey Beall and Blacklists
Jeffrey Bell, the author of the list of predatory publishers and journals widely expresses his unfavorable opinion about the open access movement in general and the academic publishing in developing countries. His latest attack was directed to SciELO, that he called on his blog “A publication favela”, in another sad attempt to discredit both open access and scholarly publication in the developing world. His opinions are personal, unfounded and biased, and do not deserve any credit. … Read More →
Motion to repudiate Mr. Jeffrey Beall’s classist attack on SciELO
By the Brazilian Forum of Public Health Journals Editors and the Associação Brasileira de Saúde Coletiva (Abrasco, Brazilian Public Health Association) … Read More →
The fenced-off ‘nice’ publication neighbourhoods of Jeffrey Beall
Jeffrey Beall, librarian at the University of Colorado, describes SciELO as a ‘publication favela’ and commercial publishers as ‘nice neighbourhoods for scholarly publications’. The only way for us to understand that is if we consider his anti-open access, anti-subsidy, and anti-non-western attitudes, which are so clearly visible in his writings. It is a pity a university librarian of an otherwise reputable university thinks like this. He is wrong, and that has to be exposed. … Read More →
Science Publishing: the Transition to Open Access Going Dutch
The negotiations between the Dutch universities (VSNU – the Association of Universities in The Netherlands) and three large publishers (Springer, Wiley, Sage) have been concluded and significant steps to include open access in the deals with those publishers have been made. With Elsevier, however, the negotiations are in deadlock, according to the VSNU. They have called for a boycott, but the real question is, of course, why it is that Elsevier, the largest, and Dutch (!) academic publisher, can’t – or won’t – do what other large publishers can – and will. I have no answer to that, but in trying to sketch the situation in some detail, I hope to add some clarity to it. The outcome of the negotiations is surely going to influence other countries. … Read More →
Ethics in research: how to improve the integrity of scientists in their work
Scientific activity as a social enterprise must maintain its credibility. The Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines are presented as a recent and innovative initiative for scientific journals, and as one of the ways to guard this social value. … Read More →
Editorial ethics – the geography of plagiarism
A recent study published in PNAS on 757,000 arXiv.org documents about the reuse of text (text overlap) shows that this practice is more common in some countries than others, but the results seem to show that the authors who extensively copy texts from others are also the less cited. … Read More →
Editorial ethics: fraudulent arbitration
In recent months there have been a significant amount of retractions of scientific papers due to fraudulent arbitration processes. Apparently “paper mills” are appearing on the market that offer researchers, for a price, the possibility that their name appear in an article in a high Impact Factor journal (although not being the author). … Read More →
Science and life: Interview – Tribute to Dr. Greene
Completing 80 years of life, Dr. Greene, professor, scientist and editor for more than 30 years awards us by sharing his knowledge and experience on issues that affect scholarly communication of Brazil in an interview given to the SciELO team. From an early age his interests were linked to research; his initial training was in Chemistry, followed later by Cell Biology. We encourage readers to share this experience. … Read More →
The Rise of China – a special issue of the Revista Brasileira de Politíca Internacional
Over the past few years, the Revista Brasileira de Politíca Internacional – RBPI has published a number of special issues dealing with burning issues in contemporary international politics, and those with special relevance for Brazil. These special issues are always published in English, and consist of content which has been brought together as a result of calls for international papers, and which have, as invited editors, specialists in the topics being discussed. The special issue for 2014 entitled “China rising – strategies and tactics of China’s growing presence in the world” (special issue – Vol. 57), available in the SciELO Brazil Collection, is published entirely in English and brings together 15 previously unpublished articles dealing with the complex rise of that country to the top level of international structures. … Read More →
Study proposes a taxonomy of motives to cite articles in scientific publications
Article examines the activity of citing publications during the process of writing a scientific paper. The suggested model consists of four main categories – Arguments, Social Alignment, Mercantile Alignment and Data – plus subcategories. The authors argue that the complexities of citation practice show how little can be assumed about the real reasons for citing an article by analyzing the final paper. The study has an impact mainly in attributing relevance to articles based solely on citations, and therefore, on journal and researcher assessment. … Read More →
The challenges of retraction: cleaning up the literature might be difficult
There is consensus that misconduct in academic publications should be remedied as soon as possible. However, there are a number of implications – ethical, moral, legal and those related to the reputation of the journals and researchers in the retraction process – that turn the process into a complex one which can often become unworkable. … Read More →
Retraction of scientific works and pseudoscience
Is the growing number of scientific retractions necessarily due to the fruits of pseudoscience? Productive reflection on the subject leads us to the need to recognize the current demands of the scientific system for researchers, conflicts of interests at stake and that science is produced by fallible human beings with their own moral values . Globalization, while supporting misconduct, strengthens social control. Increased retraction of papers is a necessary response of the social control to what some authors refer to as “pseudoscience”. … Read More →
Editorial ethics – good and bad scientific practices
III BRISPE: Brazilian Meeting on Research Integrity, Science and Publication Ethics, sponsored by FAPESP, was the third event held in Brazil with the objective to promote institutional policies and practices of ethical research integrity and responsible conduct. With the presence of several prestigious guests from developed countries, the education strategies to new scientists were analyzed as well as how to reduce bad practices such falsification of data, plagiarism, conflict of interests, manipulation of results, etc. … Read More →
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