The SciELO in Perspective blog celebrates its second anniversary

By Abel L. Packer, Alex Mendonça, Denise Peres Sales

In July 2015, the blog SciELO in Perspective celebrates its second year of regular operation with three inter-related objectives. The first is communicating, analyzing and discussing innovations and advances in the field of information science and, in particular, innovations and controversies that occur in scholarly communication. The second is giving broad visibility to the journals indexed in SciELO and, more specifically, to the research published in them. The third is sharing the development of the SciELO Program which is being guided by priority action lines in the professionalization, internationalization and sustainability of the journals.

SciELO journals form part of national research infrastructures, and are edited by scientific societies, universities, research institutes, and other institutions which, for the most part, are not-for-profit and operate with limited budgets such that many of the improvements, advances and innovations related to the action lines promoted by SciELO are achieved through cooperative efforts and solutions. The blog space SciELO in Perspective stands out amongst these cooperative efforts. It aims to promote prioritizing the use of social networks by the journal publishers as the principal media for marketing, dissemination, and exchange and discussion of the research the journals communicate.

The SciELO in Perspective blog space organizes its contents by thematic blog. In these two years of operation, the blog space has maintained two thematic blogs: the first¹, called Humanities, publishes contents produced by the journals in the field of Human Science and the second, which is more general, publishes posts on topics in information science and, more specifically, to those related to scholarly communication. The second blog acts as the official channel for the dissemination of news related to the SciELO Program which directly impacts the journals indexed in the national journal collections of the SciELO Network, such as discussions on the new criteria for indexing and for the retention of journals and, more recently, the updating of the methodology of publication of errata and retractions, and the adoption of CC_BY licenses as the principal attribution of Open Access in SciELO.

The table below summarizes the performance of these two blogs over the past two years of operation:

The posts cover a variety of formats such as press releases on new articles or journal issues, analyses, interviews, announcements, events and so on. The posts are scientific in nature and in general have citations, in which case they are indexed in the ResearchBlogging² site. All the posts are indexed by Google and in many cases are referenced in tweets, in Facebook and in other blogs. The posts from the general blog are periodically summarized in a newsletter which is sent out by SciELO to over five thousand registered email addresses.

As a point of interest, the 10 most accessed posts over the past two years in the general blog are listed here below:

1. Ethical editing practices and the problem of self-plagiarism
2. It is time to review the Brazilian postgraduation system
3. Declaration recommends eliminate the use of Impact factor for research evaluation
4. Ethical publishing – scholars have to make bibliographical references as well
5. How much does it cost to publish in Open Access?
6. Publication ethics and the problem of plagiarism
7. In the beginning it was just plagiarism – now its computer-generated fake papers as well
8. Editorial ethics: the detection of plagiarism by automated means
9. How do I get read and cited if I do not publish in elite-journals?
10. Indicators of academic productivity in University rankings: criteria and methodologies

And the 10 most accessed posts in Humanities are:

1. Cotas universitárias no Brasil: positivo ou negativo?
2. Antropologia, gênero e sexualidade no Brasil: balanço e perspectivas
3. DADOS discute a recepção e a atualidade de Max Weber em seu 150 aniversário
4. Entrevista com Maria Isabel da Cunha
5. Crise hídrica, Escassez de água e Diretos humanos – Ambiente & Sociedade abre chamada de trabalhos para volume especial
6. O relato dos ouvidores de vozes nas redes sociais
7. O gênero da política: feminismos, estado e eleições
8. Preconceito como manutenção das desigualdades: estudos de raça/etnia no Brasil
9. O efeito Foucault na Educação
10. Nietzsche: da sedução à pesquisa filosófica

The blog space is administered by an editorial team at SciELO, and is open to contributions from the journal publishers of the SciELO Network as well as from authors and users in general. The posts in the general blog are published simultaneously in Spanish, English and Portuguese.

Over the next two years, with the support of the different communities of editors and researchers, SciELO plans on widening the thematic coverage of the blog space SciELO in Perspective with the objective of covering all areas, and on promoting it as a cooperative dissemination space for the journals of the SciELO Network to interact with peers and with the world.

Notes

1. SciELO em Perspectiva: Humanas – http://humanas.blog.scielo.org/

2. ResearchBlogging – http://researchblogging.org/

Translated from the original in Portuguese by Nicholas Cop Consulting.