Monthly Archives: January 2018

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Quantity does matter as citation impact increases with productivity [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in January/2018]

Many scholars are encouraged to focus on the quality not the quantity of their publications, the rationale being that becoming too focused on productivity risks reducing the quality of one’s work. But is this, in fact, the case? Peter van den Besselaar and Ulf Sandström have studied a large sample of researchers and found that, while results vary by field, there is a positive and stronger than linear relationship between productivity and quality (in terms of the top cited papers). This same pattern appears to apply to institutions as well as individual researchers. Read More →

Sant Joan d’Alacant Declaration in defense of Open Access to scientific publications, by the group of editors of Spanish journals on health sciences (GERECS)

Aligned with the European Open Science Policy Platform and other declarations, the group of editors of Spanish journals on health sciences, in its last November meeting, issued the Sant Joan d’Alacant declaration in defense of Open Access. Read More →

SciELO Indexing Criteria align with open science communication

The new SciELO Brazil Criteria are aligned with the good practices of open science communication. They become valid from January 2018 and project a new stage of improvement of Brazil’s scientific communication, which should be progressively extended to the other countries of the SciELO Network. The advancement towards open science has as a characteristic the repositioning of the main players of scholarly communication: authors, journals, and research funders. Read More →

Of Subscriptions and Article Processing Charges

Article Processing Charges (APCs) – although they face criticism – do have advantages over subscriptions. They make immediate open access possible, but they also allow other drawbacks of subscriptions to be avoided, such as fixed page budgets. What APCs have not been able to do, is lower the financial burden of science communication on the research community, as many open access advocates had wanted and expected. A solution may be found – even if only a partial one – in the provision of preprints as a matter of course. Read More →