Series of interviews with the President and ex-presidents of the ABEC: Interview with Lewis Joel Greene

This year, the SciELO Program is celebrating 20 Years of regular operation, promoting the strengthening and development of national research communication capacities and infrastructures through nationally published quality journals. SciELO fulfills this task by allying the conditions and priorities of each journal and its respective subject areas to the international state of the art.

Over its 20 years of operation, SciELO has always relied on the support of the Brazilian Association of Scientific Editors (Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos – ABEC) and vice-versa. Based on their identities and functions, ABEC and SciELO operate in partnership for the improvement of Brazilian journals. It is worth remembering that the meeting between Abel Packer and Rogerio Meneghini that led to the founding of SciELO occurred at an ABEC meeting in 1996.

In the celebrations of its 20 Years, SciELO is giving special emphasis to the relevance of quality journals that are edited nationally and their insertion in the global flow of scientific information, particularly in alignment with the best practices of open science communication. These are positions shared with ABEC.

This interview, with Lewis Joel Greene, who served as president of ABEC from 1996 to 1999 is the second in the series of interviews with the President and ex-presidents of the ABEC.

What are the main advances and challenges faced by Brazilian journals in the near future?

The incorporation of Brazilian journals into the global publication indexing system through the SciELO platform is the most important achievement of the program. Today, any person in the world with access to SciELO or Web of Science has direct, immediate and free access to all the articles published in Brazilian academic journals.

It is imperative that SciELO system be enabled to continue to provide the infrastructure, platform and international contacts required to promote the national capacity of research communication, by constantly improving and expanding the quality the national journals and the SciELO platform. Research communication is necessary for the development, expansion and continuity of Brazilian science.

I propose that SciELO and ABEC use the journals and the SciELO infrastructure to create new approaches to advance research communication at the level of post-graduation. Courses that emphasize formation rather than information are needed to prepare students to analyze, evaluate, criticize and edit scientific documents. Education at a distance may be an approach to the problems created by the size and population of Brazil.

About Lewis Joel Greene

At present, he is volunteer full professor (senior collaborator) of Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto, Universidade de São Paulo, at the Department of Cellular, Molecular Biology and Pathogenic Bioagents. He is supervisor of the Protein Chemistry Center at the Fundação Hemocentro in Ribeirão Preto, where he conducts studies on chemical, functional and structural characterization of proteins, using traditional approaches in protein chemistry and proteomics analysis. This interview, with Lewis Joel Greene, who served as president of ABEC from 1996 to 1999 is the second in the series.

Translated from the original in Portuguese by Lilian Nassi-Calò.