On the first day of SciELO 20 Years Week, during the WG5 – Scientific Publishing Innovations and the Future of Peer Review and Journals, new methodologies for opening the publishing process using preprints servers were discussed throughout the day before an audience of more than 50 people and presentations of six experts. Text available only in Spanish. … Read More →
Pirates of the medical literature – a worldwide bibliometric study
A large volume of medical literature is being illegally downloaded in almost every country in the world. There is a significant relationship between the scientific output of these countries and the density of illegal downloads, especially in middle-income countries. This unequal pattern of legal access to medical literature requires the attention of both the publishing industry and policy makers. … Read More →
Administration of research data in France’s CNRS
The paper discussed here presents the results of a national CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) survey answered by 432 directors of public research laboratories in France on the opinions and behavior of experienced scientists about research data management (RDM). … Read More →
The role of non-Brazilian contribution in the publishing performance of psychology journals in Brazil
An examination of publishing performance among psychology journals in Brazil finds higher publishing performance associated with non-Brazilian contribution, in terms of: authors and editorial board members from English-speaking countries; as well as collaboration with authors from English-speaking countries. Implications are discussed for editors and publishers, as well as arbiters of public policy. … Read More →
The absurdity of the same requirement for law that the rest of the scientific publications
Bibliometric indexes (e.g., WoS/Scopus), normally used for hard sciences and even social sciences, should not be used as a parameter for law research in the same way, as it does not respond to the same extent to measure quality or productivity of research in this field. Text available only in Spanish. … Read More →
Plan S — and Article Processing Charges (APCs)
Recently, in Europe, a plan has been launched to accelerate the transition to open access. It is called Plan S. Its key principle is stated as follows: “After 1 January 2020 scientific publications on the results from research funded by public grants provided by national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.” Some issues are highlighted, especially the issue of the cost of APCs, and some suggestions for possible improvement of Plan S are given. … Read More →
ORCID and publishers: connecting researchers with research
ORCID enables researchers to be uniquely identified and connected to their contributions, and to share information on a global scale. Read this blog to learn how the publishing community is implementing ORCID to engage with authors and reviewers and how to join the conversation! … Read More →
Challenges in peer review of scientific articles on Administration in Brazil
Sharing their experiences as authors, reviewers and editors of scientific journals, Sandro Cabral and Marcelo de Souza Bispo reflect on the challenges of the article evaluation process, criticize the current system that favors productivism, overloading the reviewers, and draws attention on the need to train good reviewers in PhD courses in Brazil. … Read More →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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