The use of the multidimensional academic ranking U-Multirank to compare academic and industry-related knowledge production of Brazilian Universities with other Latin American countries, shows that, while Brazil leads in number of academic publications, Chile is ahead in both citation numbers and patents awarded, with Brazil lagging behind in these Indicators’ world averages. … Read More →
How altmetrics are used to evaluate scientific output in Latin America
Altmetrics are a group of alternative metrics that capture mentions made to scientific papers on social networks, news sites and blogs; policies and patents; Wikipedia, and other sources to assess the impact of publications on the social web. A study using journals and articles from the SciELO network in Latin America was carried out to qualify the web presence of Latin American research results and explore the potential of altmetrics. … Read More →
How the rhetoric of excellence influences research evaluation
Academic institutions advertise their teaching and research programs associated with prominent positions in university rankings, or names that are synonymous with success, prestige, and reputation. This post reviews an article that shows how the “rhetoric of excellence” is used in the academic world and favors the lack of reproducibility, fraud and the ineffective distribution of research grants and proposes strategies to overcome it. … Read More →
OJS Community Priorities Survey Report [Originally published in the PKP site]
The PKP Technical Committee completed its first community survey, with a focus on trying to better understand what specific features journal managers and editors of OJS would find most useful for their work. We distributed this survey broadly, and were delighted by the enthusiastic response, resulting in more than 524 completed surveys. … Read More →
The latest blows from predatory (or pirate) journals
Piracy and, specifically, scams by predatory publishers are growing around the world, becoming a growing concern in academic publishing, drawing the attention of the most serious publishers. This problem is not so serious in Latin American scientific publications. Post available only in Spanish. … Read More →
The Impossibility of Open Science without Otherness and Epistemic Plurality [Originally published as the editorial in Revista de Administração Contemporânea vol. 26 no. 2]
[The] objective in this text is to present a counterpoint to the positivist bias that has dominated the debate on open science and eventually highlight some problems and provide a more plural and inclusive perspective on the subject. … Read More →
Guest Post — Building an Easier Path Toward Open Access Book Publishing: Support for Authors [Originally published in the Scholarly Kitchen in March/2021]
Christina Emery presents an updated overview of the open access books landscape and examines the challenges of open access book publishing according to feedback from authors and researchers, plus what support is available to them. … Read More →
How much does it cost to publish an article? Academic publishing services and their market values
How much does it cost to publish an open access article? This post reports a study published in F1000Research, in which the authors collected detailed data on each stage of scientific publishing, from acquisition, preparation, up to dissemination of content, considering six scenarios with different editorial service providers. The average cost varies between US$460 and US$520, depending on the number of articles published per year. … Read More →
Study on the use of continuous publication in SciELO Brazil collection
The study carried out by researchers from the Universidade Federal University do Rio Grande do Sul points out that there is a tendency, in recent years, for journals to move away from the publication model based on volume and numbers, with a significant increase in adherence to continuous publication. The publication mode gained importance in Brazil after being included in the SciELO Brazil publishing criteria. … Read More →
How will the Rights Retention Strategy affect scholarly publishing? [Originally published in the LSE Impact blog in September/2021]
The extent that authors retain control over their published research is dependent on what rights they sign over to their publisher prior to publication. As part of efforts to promote the immediate open publication of research a number of research funders have endorsed the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS), by which authors can declare their author-accepted manuscript to be open access. In this post Stephen Eglen, explores the rights retention strategy and discusses the potential impact it might have on scholarly communication more broadly. … Read More →
Comments on convenience authorship [Originally published as the editorial in Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências vol. 93 no. 3]
One of the consequences of this pandemic is the increase of submission of scientific articles that has raised concerns about their quality. Along with this come authorship issues, such as convenience authorship, which should also appear on the editors’ radar because of the potential deleterious consequences that could affect the new generation of scientists. … Read More →
Preprints optimize research communication [Originally published as the editorial in Revista Habanera de Ciencias Médicas vol. 20 no. 4]
Preprints have been established as an initial step in research communication after 50 years of its conception at the US NIH and the beginning of operation of the arXiv server. It is an enrichment of the classic scholarly communication model in which unpublished manuscripts are submitted to journals for peer review. Journals have, among others, the critical role of validating research. Preprints are made available before this validation step as a means of accelerating the communication of research results and improving manuscripts before sending them to a journal for validation. The use of preprints is identified as one of open science practices. … Read More →
The Holy Grail does not exist: OPERAS-P and OASPA’s workshops for publishers on innovative business models for books [Originally published in the OAPEN blog in July/2020]
In May 2021, OPERAS and OASPA hosted a series of three European workshops on business models for open access books targeted specifically at small and medium-sized academic book publishers.. As part of the OPERAS-P project work package 6 (Innovation) OPERAS was looking into innovative, non-BPC business models. The feedback gathered in the course of these three workshops informed a report The Future of scholarly communications, published at the end of June 2021.
“The discussion showed that while the Holy Grail of OA book publishing does not exist, what does exist however, is a strong will to experiment with various approaches, spearheaded by small and medium sized academic book publishers.” … Read More →
The role of review articles goes beyond synthesizing current knowledge about a research topic
Review articles, besides helping to keep researchers updated on specific topics, play an important role in the curation of academic works and can influence emerging research topics through citation patterns. … Read More →
What are preprints? [Originally published in DADOS’ blog in May/2021]
The traditional double-blind assessment model of scientific articles has been challenged in the last two decades by the so-called “preprint servers”. However, there are still many concerns in the Social Sciences about what preprints are and what changes they bring to the traditional framework of scientific assessment and publication. In this mini class, we seek to answer these questions from the experience of the journal DADOS. … Read More →
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