Monthly Archives: February 2014

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SciELO Citation Index in the Web of Science

The SciELO Citation Index is now available in the WoS platform. It represents an important contribution to the development of the SciELO journals and is a leading edge solution to the issue of the international indexing of the journals, in particular to the counts of the citations received by the published articles. SciELO CI should be considered a standard to be used in the evaluation processes of agencies that support research and scholarly communication. Read More →

Reproducibility of research results: the tip of the iceberg

Research on clinical trials with drugs under development is the foundation upon which pharmaceutical companies base the development of their new drugs, thus the reliability of the outcomes of this research is of utmost importance. However studies show that between 60% and 70% of this research may include irreproducible results. It is necessary that the parties involved become aware of the extent of the problem and join together to find a solution. Read More →

Reproducibility of research results: a subjective view

At a time when discussions about ethics in experimentation and scientific publication are going beyond laboratories and academic environments, and are peaking the interest of society as a whole, another threat is emerging to the credibility of science. Irreproducibility of research results is affecting the different areas of knowledge and is of concern to all. The pressure on researchers for positive and high impact outcomes is bound up with the natural desire of scientists to make groundbreaking discoveries, even if the evidence points to the contrary. Read More →

Editorial ethics: the detection of plagiarism by automated means

The growth in plagiarism in academic articles requires publishers to have effective plagiarism detection systems, known as PDS, since there are multiple ways that this dishonest practice can be concealed. The issue is of such importance that, since 2004, the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin has been maintaining a specialized site of PDS software evaluations. Read More →

Publishing giants fight back – Elsevier goes author hunting

Last December Elsevier sent out thousands of e-mails to repositories of articles from scientific publications featuring open access articles that had been published in Elsevier journals, requesting that those articles be removed, by invoking the protection given to copyright holders granted by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This raised an alarm in the academic community because it could be the start of similar actions by other commercial publishers. Voices have been raised in defense of the rights of authors, but sooner or later the researchers must decide whether the traditional publishing model is the one that best suits their interests. Read More →

Scientific Data: Nature Publishing Group moves the communication of scientific data forward with its new online open access publication

The description and communication of research data is an integral part of the opening up of science and one which eScience adheres to; it is one of the specific SciELO action lines. Amongst the many initiatives which are in progress, it is the announcement made by Nature Publishing Group concerning the launch of the publication entitled Scientific Data which stands out. This publication is geared towards communicating the descriptions of scientific data files. Read More →