The routine practice of evaluating the journal Impact Factor to determine where to submit a manuscript has been reconsidered to the detriment of the social impact of the journal in the relationship that the journal establishes with the scientific community and the public. Social media metrics act in this direction by measuring the journal social media impact factor which may assist in managing the journals’ web presence in the profiles kept on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. … Read More →
Scientific-public interface in times of correction of scientific literature: Contemporary ethical issues
The process of correcting scientific literature becomes increasingly accelerated and reflects, among several factors, a greater scrutiny by scientific publishers. Unlike what happened about two decades ago, when retracting an article was rare, today it has been integrated into the editorial culture. In this context, the way in which this correction process is articulated with the news flow about science deserves attention. In the science-public interface, retractions broaden the spaces to strengthen public understanding about science and its mechanisms of self-regulation. How to extend this space is one of the ethical discussions of our time. … Read More →
What does a new approach mean (for journals, research councils)?
Preprints are a development underway in science communication and publishing. For journals, this has consequences. They may adopt a passive role, an opposing stance, or an encouraging, stimulating role, and see it as an opportunity, placing their journal in the midst of the preprint development. These are issues to be discussed in detail at the SciELO 20 Years Conference in September 2018. … Read More →
Why Crossref exists and persists
In today’s world, an author’s work needs a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for it to become discoverable, citable, and linkable. This unique alphanumeric string identifies the content of a research work, and remains associated with it irrespective of changes to its web location. Discover the origins of the DOI, how Crossref was founded, and why they continue to exist and persist. … Read More →
Geo for All – Open Principles in GeoEducation and Science
Central to Geo for All mission is the belief that knowledge is a public good and Open Principles in Education will provide great opportunities for everyone. The key ingredients that make Open Geospatial Science possible are enshrined in Open Principles, i.e: Open Source geospatial software, Open data, Open standards, Open educational resources, and Open access to research publications. … Read More →
How long does it take to do science? The emergence of time in scholarly communication
Scholarly communication has undergone great transformations in the last two decades, mainly due to the popularization of new information technologies, which imposes a new regime of time and speed in scientific publishing. However, these changes are not just responses to technological advances. These are more complex issues related to the reconfiguration of academic work and changes on the paradigm of communication and the difficulties and challenges faced by editors and researchers over time management. … Read More →
Scientific Data Management – from collection to preservation
Proper management of data used in scientific research has become a mandatory part of good research practices. The Open Science era has revolutionized scientific methodology, motivating the emergence of new lines of research in all areas of knowledge. This post describes some challenges of this management from the computational point of view. … Read More →
Peer review – on structures and content
Peer review is a constituent part of scholarly communication. It has many modalities: simple blind, double blind, open, and now, also partial reviews. Partial reviews, which only validates the technical soundness of a document, is a feature of open access mega-journals such as PLoS ONE and several others. … Read More →
Communication and peer review should be universally separated
The SciELO 20 Years Week will promote an ample and open forum on the future of scientific communication and journals. There is a discussion group for each topic of the SciELO 20 Years Conference. The discussion starts with this comment by Jan Velterop on the separation between communication and peer review posted in the discussion group of the Panel 3.1 that deals with fast communication via preprints and other means to accelerate the availability of research results. … Read More →
Fiocruz facing the challenge of Open Science for Development and Public Health
The large mobilization of the countries around Open Science is expressed by the development of infrastructures, Data Management Plans, training, and evaluation and reward metrics. As a new paradigm, Open Science must focus on the interests and benefits to society, as well as advances in knowledge. In the health area, opening research data can promote a more agile science focused on solving problems, formulating evidence-based public policies, and citizen participation as knowledge producer. … Read More →
Open peer review perspectives: a thought-provoking question mark
Research analyzes the feasibility of adopting Open Peer Review by Information Science journals. This post presents the first step already completed focusing on the editors. The second stage, already underway, is focused on referees in order to reach a comprehensive view on the adoption of Open Peer Review by Information Science journals. … Read More →
Discussing indicators in research funding: What role do altmetrics play? [Originally published in Europe of Knowledge blog in December/2017]
At any rate, altmetrics, or alternative metrics, are gaining momentum in higher education. This post is based on my master’s thesis that explores the usage of altmetrics with a focus on research funding. Altmetrics track down and count the mentions of scholarly outputs in social media, news sites, policy papers, and social bookmarking sites. Then altmetrics data providers aggregate the number of mentions. This allows an observation of how many times research has been viewed, discussed, followed, shared, and downloaded. … Read More →
SciELO launches new operation interface for its collections
The new operating interface of the national and thematic collections of the SciELO Network offers a contemporary visual experience and it is characterized by its fast response. The development of the interface used efficient, flexible and high security programming, processing and integration technologies. The new interface has been in experimental operation with the SciELO Public Health thematic collection since November 2017. In 2019 all SciELO Network collections will be operating with the new interface. The launch of the new interface is part of the 20 years celebration of the SciELO Program. … Read More →
Authorship criteria preserve scholarly communication integrity
The increasing demand for transparency and openness in research and its communication aims to increase the reliability and reproducibility of published results. The attribution of authorship, due to its relevance in the academic processes of evaluation and reward, requires commitment, transparency and clearly defined rules. A group of researchers comprised of scholars, research institutions, funding agencies, publishers and scientific societies developed a taxonomy with 14 categories to classify authors’ contributions. Linking the categories of this taxonomy to the author’s persistent digital identifier (ORCID) and article metadata allows to track authors’ contributions through their publications and their careers. … Read More →
Scientific communication practices in High Energy Physics: potential of preprints
The use of preprints repositories in High Energy Physics (HEP) to accelerate scientific communication dates back more than half a century, encouraging the practice of self-archiving and open access to research results. This report reflects on the potential of preprints in HEP scientific communication through the open access initiatives SPIRES and arXiv. The success of preprints repositories and databases in physics seems to have encouraged other areas to create their own thematic repositories, favoring the free circulation of information and discussion of scientific data. … Read More →
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