ANPOCS, its National Meetings, and Open Science

By Gilberto Hochman, Fiocruz and ANPOCS, and Luiz Augusto Campos, IESP-UERJ

Image: John-Mark Smith.

Between the 19^th and 27^th of October, the 45^th Meeting of the National Association of Graduate Studies in Social Sciences (Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação em Ciências Sociais, ANPOCS) took place. In its second virtual edition, the Meeting received more than 950 papers discussed in its Graduate Working Groups (WGs) and Graduate Seminars (GSs). It is one of the largest and most renowned events in the social sciences, as well as a central forum for debate on the academic and political prospect of the discipline.

Part of our discussions focused on the editorial challenges of academic journals in our area in the Scientific Editors Forum, which featured three broadcast sessions and permanently accessible on YouTube. Despite the particularities of each journal, they all face serious issues related to their financial sustainability, as well as recent transformations in the world of scientific publishing of the Social Sciences, specially those related to Open Science that have been transforming scholarly communication, not without strong resistance, and which has already been incorporated into government, international development agencies, and international organizations policies.

Thanks to the initiative of different institutions, Brazilian scientific publishing has been professionalizing itself consistently in recent decades. Despite the strong funding crisis, the number of journals in the area has also consistently expanded and its editorial practices have become more professional. Federal and state funding agencies, incentive programs from various universities and research centers, and the SciELO Platform played a central role in inducing these processes that are still ongoing.

The Congresses and Meetings of the three areas of Social Sciences (Anthropology, Sociology, and Political Science) have been forums for debates on these changes. However, it still remains to assess the extent to which they themselves cannot join efforts to institutionalize new editorial practices. For the next year, ANPOCS will encourage the submission to preprints servers of papers approved to different WGs and GSs. The idea here is not only to encourage the submission of complete papers to the Congress, but fundamentally to encourage the registry of authorship and originality, the sharing of working processes, information and data, and collaboration with other researchers and research groups. With this, we hope to also add to the preprint server the discussions held in the scope of WGs and GSs, consolidating the role of our Congress in preparing manuscripts for later publication.

A growing number of social science journals are accepting submission of articles published on preprint servers. The Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, one of the ANPOCS journals, adopted this orientation in 2021. Another of our publications, the Revista Brasileira de Informação Bibliográfica em Ciências Sociais (BIB), also reformulated its guidelines to open up to the Open Science program. The goal is not only to increase this set of journals, but, above all, to incorporate preprints from the Annual Meetings into these processes, encouraging a change in the scholarly communication practices in the social sciences community and their own journals. This policy aims at strengthening the paths of social sciences towards Open Science and establishing a dialogue on a basic editorial policy for the area regarding the issue, abiding to the specificities and autonomy of each journal.

The practice of circulating manuscripts prior to acceptance by journals is not new in our disciplines, research centers and graduate programs. Different institutions maintained for long periods publications that aimed at circulating texts still in the consolidation phase or preliminary research results. This was the case, for example, of the IPEA Discussion Texts, the Studies Series, with almost 100 papers, of the former IUPERJ, current IESP-UERJ and the NEPP-Unicamp Research Notebooks, published between 1987 and 2010 and resumed in 2017. Furthermore, all of the most important congresses in our area seek to keep the approved papers on their web pages.

In this sense, the current intention is to consolidate these practices by promoting networks that connect scientific output, academic debates in meetings, preprint repositories and servers, and journals. In doing so, ANPOCS hopes to carry out its institutional mission, which is to contribute to the scholarly and political strengthening of scientific journals and the Social Sciences as Open Sciences.

External links

ANPOCS – YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/anpocsof/videos

Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais (RBCSOC): https://www.scielo.br/rbcsoc/

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