Author: Scielo

Implications of SciELO in the history of science coverage in LA&C

Historical data on the presence of America/Latin America in bibliographic sources were used as references to review the implications of SciELO in the recent coverage of scientific journals in the region. Three scenarios were mentioned. Expansion of modern science (journals and catalog of the Royal Society, XVII-XIX centuries); hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon citation indexes (20th century); diversification of coverage and type of indexes (21st century). Through the citation geography visible in SciELO, signs of changes can be seen in the specialization of regional journals as cited sources; we believe that this trend will continue in journals covering regional issues. Text available only in Spanish. Read More →

SciELO 20 years: from visionary to indispensable [Originally published in Jornal da Unicamp in October/2018]

SciELO celebrates 20 years, surpassing in these two decades the mark of 1,200 journals from 14 countries, indexed and accessible through its portal. There are more than 700,000 daily hits. The project is still a pioneer producing an information source complementary to the international bibliographic and bibliometric databases. Read More →

How journals can make the most of Crossref membership

Welcome to the Crossref/SciELO blog series on DOIs and the metadata associated with these persistent identifiers. In the previous posts Chrissie Cormack Wood, Head of Communications introduced you to Crossref, I talked about the critical role of the DOI, Isaac Farley, Crossref Support Manager, wrote about the difference between preprints and ahead of print, and Rachael Lammey, Head of Community Outreach discussed the options for DOI acquisition. This blog completes this series, and provides information on how journals can extend their use of Crossref DOIs to additional services. Read More →

PKP and SciELO announce development of open source Preprint Server system

In commemoration of SciELO’s 20th anniversary, the Public Knowledge Project is joining with SciELO to collaborate on developing a multilingual and multidisciplinary Preprint Server system, based on Open Journal Systems, that will be integrated into and serve the SciELO community of journals. Read More →

At 20 Years, the SciELO Network updates priorities and advances to open science

The 20 Years of SciELO mark the transition to a new period of development of the program, the network of 16 national collections and mainly of the journals, which will be characterized by the progressive adoption of best practices of open science communication that advocates the celerity and transparency in the evaluation processes and communication of research and the opening of the articles’ underlying content in favor of their reuse and the reproducibility of research results. The updating of the priority lines of action will contribute to updating the collections’ indexing policies and the journals’ editorial policies. Read More →

Open Access and open science: a historic opportunity

The open access movement in Latin America has a historic opportunity to connect with other practices, tools and experiences of open science – open data, open parts evaluation, open laboratory notebooks, open software and free hardware – and invite other actors to participate and share their contributions to science. Read More →

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

The Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos (ABEC) and SciELO have key roles in promoting policies aimed at the advancement of Brazilian science regarding production, dissemination and internationalization, as well as always bringing to discussion topics such as ethics and best practices, aiming to foster the entire Brazilian publishing ecosystem, i.e., from the researcher/author through service providers, until its publication. 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.
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Series of interviews with the President and ex-presidents of the ABEC: Interview with Rui Seabra Ferreira Jr.

The Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos (ABEC) and SciELO have key roles in promoting policies aimed at the advancement of Brazilian science regarding production, dissemination and internationalization, as well as always bringing to discussion topics such as ethics and best practices, aiming to foster the entire Brazilian publishing ecosystem, i.e., from the researcher/author through service providers, until its publication. Read More →

The power relations in world science. An anti-ranking to know the science produced in the periphery

The concept of mainstream science was consolidated globally because publications became the main axis of institutional and individual evaluation also in the periphery. The use of bibliometrics contributed to reinforce the extension of a progressively homogenous style of publication and the International Rankings of universities favored the extension of a heteronomous evaluative culture. However, the styles of production and circulation of the so-called science in the periphery are very diverse. Read More →

Competitiveness and Open Access of journals in a non-English speaking country

J-STAGE is a journal platform on which Japanese academic societies can publish their journals. Although more than 80% of them are freely accessible, most of them do not claim to be open access. Some barriers to open access publishing are described based on our experience obtained through conversations with the societies. Read More →

The Local and the Global: Puncturing the myth of the “international” journal

What are journals for? In one view they are a brand, a masthead that stands as a widely recognized proxy for some notion of quality assurance or interest. An alternate view is that they are communities, even “clubs” as we have explored in one article. The first of these views privileges the concept of “international” journals and an assumption that general interest implies better work. The second focuses attention on local needs and interests. Here the question is different, how well does a specific journal serve a specific community. Read More →

SciELO, Open Infrastructure and Independence

SciELO has been a shining example of how a publicly supported infrastructure could bolster scholarship and knowledge as public goods. However, its increasingly focus on “professionalization” and “internationalization” may serve to reduce the intellectual and linguistic heterogeneity of the region, while subjecting the evaluation of quality to “standards” largely set by multinational corporations that are far more interested in profit extraction than in local development. Read More →

All journals should have a policy defining authorship – here’s what to include [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in January/2018]

Scientific research papers with large numbers of authors have become more commonplace, increasing the likelihood of authorship disputes. Danielle Padula, Theresa Somerville and Ben Mudrak emphasise the importance of journals clearly defining and communicating authorship criteria to researchers. As well as having a policy for inclusion, journals should also indicate unethical authorship practices, clarify the order of authors at an early stage, consider recognising “contributorship”, and refer any disputes that do arise to the authors’ institutions. Read More →

The basics of sponsorship at Crossref

There are many journals that want to register content and benefit from the services provided by Crossref, but may not be able to do so alone. These organizations use sponsors. Sponsors are organizations who publish on behalf of groups of smaller organizations. Nearly 650 of the 800 Brazil members of Crossref are represented by such a sponsor. Read More →

Output and impact of Brazilian research: confronting international and national contexts

Brazilian scientific research, seen through its articles and their impact reveals a scenario that 30 years ago could not have been described. SciELO concretizes what Garfield envisioned for Latin America in the 1990s, allowing to delineate the citation flow, as in many countries, as yet unseen, and allowing to question the pertinence of Gibbs’s expression: “lost science in the third world”. Read More →