Category: Interviews

Productivism, research and scholarly communication: the thin line between poison and medicine

With the word, Teresa Cristina Rego: “It is an pressing requirement that new ways of encouraging, evaluating and socializing academic output are created. This is the great challenge facing us”. “Our government and its representatives, who work in bodies linked to the evaluation and promotion of research, should also be aware of the gravity of the situation in which we find ourselves. And this must be done before it is too late”. In an essay which concentrates upon the thorny questions surrounding productivism, the researcher opens a series of three interviews which focus on a discussion of the challenges facing Brazilian science published in volume 40 of the journal Educação e Pesquisa (Education and Research). Read More →

Interview with Atila Iamarino

Social networks are gaining increasing importance in scientific communication. One of the classical tools of social media is scientific blogs. Relevant questions about the use of blogs in scientific communication are disclosed and discussed in this interview with Atila Iamarino, published in both audio and text. Read More →

Interview with William Gunn

Mendeley, the service for managing and sharing scholarly articles, is an innovative tool that makes up the new modus operandi of scholarly communication based on networks of researchers. Mendeley was acquired by the commercial publisher Elsevier which guarantees, however, to keep it free to use. Read More →

Interview with Cameron Neylon

The Open Access advocate, Cameron Neylon, speaks about the role of PLoS journals on the dissemination of best quality articles, through a business model that transfers from readers to authors the responsibility for the payment of editorial costs. Read More →

Interview with Mark Patterson

Mark Patterson, the keynote speaker of SciELO 15 Years Conference, describes how eLife is consolidating the idea that science communication is an integral part – one of the most important – of academic research through open access publication of outstanding content selected by a select group of researchers. The researcher will also talk about the recent controversial article on open access published by Science. Patterson attributes to SciELO the growing visibility and quality of Latin America journals. Read More →

Interview – Rogério Meneghini

In this interview, Rogerio Meneghini reflects that the international visibility of journals from emerging economy countries depends not only on the field but also on journal evaluation which has to be understood as a mechanism which seeks to improve them. Technical writing courses in universities in the first year are important in this aspect and, going beyond papers and projects, the learning of how to write a patent is particularly important these days. Read More →

Interview with José Adolfo Rodríguez Gallardo

UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México – National Autonomous University of Mexico), which figures prominently in the academic ouptut of Latin America, and CONACYT – National Council of Science and Technology, have created a working group to improve Mexico’s academic publications. UNAM coordinates SciELO Mexico and for the past 30 years has been producing the CLASE, PERIODICA and Latindex databases which cover all areas of knowledge. As of 2006, it is promoting Open Access journals and repositories. Read More →

Interview with Janet Seggie

To improve the quality of the peer review process, Dr. Janet Seggie recommends formal training specifically addressing this activity as part of a researcher’s normal tasks, and give him or her the corresponding credit. This method could be better than the options of paid review and of proposals of open peer review. Read More →

Interview with Cicilia K. Peruzzo

With 50 years since the creation of the academic discipline of Communication Science in Brazil, what assessment can be made today of the successes and challenges of the field? Currently there are 64 graduate course in the country, while there were 6 in the 80‘s.The journal Intercom, the first academic journal in Communication in Brazil to be made available in open access, is an exciting editorial project that corresponds to an important part of this process of the development of the field. Read More →

Interview with Susana I. Córdoba de Torresi

Susana I. Cordoba de Torresi, from the Brazilian Chemical Society discusses the mission, achievements and challenges of the Society’s journals, from having them ranked in the national Qualis system, to how SciELO has improved their visibility. Read More →

Interview with Euan Adie, CEO of altmetric.com

Altmetrics is something that cannot be ignored. Based on the online monitoring of social networks in order to track the impact of academic publications, this new field is experiencing a rapid surge in interest. In an interview given exclusively to the SciELO in Perspectives blog, various aspects of Altmetrics are addressed by Euan Adie – CEO of altmetric.com. Euan will also be one of the speakers at the SciELO 15 Years Conference. Read More →

Interview with Indrajit Banerjee, Director of the UNESCO Information Society Division

To achieve the goal of open and inclusive knowledge societies, different approaches and strategies were adopted by UNESCO. In this interview, Indrajit Banerjee highlights that SciELO’s decentralized cooperative platform provides the context for a country to take charge of the process of Open Access publishing. Read More →

Interview with Vincent Larivière

Bibliometrics/Scientometrics is at the heart of information science and It is important to recall the various limitations of bibliometric indicators – warns Vincent Larivière. The journal Impact Factor provides a useful “holistic” indication of the relative position of a journal within a subfield. Most researchers outside Library and Information Science have no clue on its actual limitations! Read More →

Interview with Hooman Momen, Editor of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization

The editor of the WHO Bulletin talks about the various trends permeating international Open Access scholarly communication, the Finch report (UK), megajournals, multilingualism, and the transformative impact of technologies that always bring out conditions that favor or challenge the development of journals of developing countries or emerging economies, in particular those of SciELO. Read More →

Interview with Abel Packer

SciELO developed as an integral part of the research infrastructure of the countries where it operates, focusing on the goal of contributing to the improvement of the journals it indexes and publishes in open access. Abel Packer, Coordinator of the SciELO Program, talks of the reasons for the success of the program, the expectations of the SciELO 15 Years Conference and the future sustainability of the program. Read More →