A theoretical peer-review model assesses the effects of referees’ unethical conduct on approving and rejecting articles and how journal editors can mitigate this behavior. What is at stake is the reliability, transparency and efficiency of pre-publication peer review. … Read More →
SciELO 20 Years – September 26-28th, 2018
The celebration of SciELO’s 20 years will comprise a series of events related to the evaluation of the performance of SciELO as a differentiated model of open access publishing. The events will culminate with an international conference which projects as a landmark forum for discussing the innovations of scholarly communication in line with open science practices. … Read More →
The myopia of bibliometric indicators
The use of bibliometric indicators in science evaluation is a ubiquitous practice, despite the fact that there is no unequivocal relationship between citations and scientific quality, impact or merit. A recent study showed that the indiscriminate use of these indicators may hinder the publication of innovative research results, delaying the development of science. … Read More →
How to find articles in open access – tips from my favorite nerd
Scholarly communication available online, whether in journals or repositories, adds up to millions, and this figure grows every year. What browser efficient tools are available to researchers, librarians, students, and the like to find the open-access versions of the articles that interest them? … Read More →
Grant applications submitted to the NIH can cite preprints
The use of preprints as a means of accelerating research communication has become a frequent practice in many areas of knowledge also as a way to improve peer review. The U.S. National Institutes of Health, a renowned research and development agency, recently announced that grant applications and reports are entitled to cite preprints, “to speed the dissemination and enhance the rigor of their work”. … Read More →
Gender disparities in science persist despite significant advances
The participation of women as authors in academic publications has been increasing significantly worldwide and in all areas of knowledge, reaching 49% in Brazil and Portugal, followed by Australia (44%) and the European Union (41%). Gender equity in science, however, still has a long way to go, especially in the editing and peer review functions. A study of more than 41,000 articles published between 2007 and 2015 shows that male editors – who are majority – preferentially select same gender referees. … Read More →
Openness is the only quality of an academic article that can be objectively measured
Quality of scientific research articles is a widespread preoccupation in academic circles. The most used proxy is based on citation counts, not of the article itself, but of the averages of articles appearing in the same journal during a given time window. This is known as the Journal Impact Factor, which may be objective within its own definition, but utterly lacks objectivity with regard to scientific quality of individual articles. Only some technical qualities of articles can be assessed at the time of their publication, and, significantly, their openness, the degree to which the research results they describe can be immediately and universally shared. … Read More →
Editors of Brazilian journals – a hard life that is getting harder! [Originally published as the editorial in Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências vol. 89 no. 1]
The financing of journals of Brazil can be improved by extending the validity period of research grants, in order to allow publishers a better plan for articles publication. An editorial written by Alexander Kellner in the first issue of 2017 of Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências examines the challenge faced by editors of journals of Brazil and highlights their hard work in attracting relevant manuscripts, seeking to achieve ever greater levels of excellence and internationalization. … Read More →
Plain-language summaries of research: Something for everyone [Originally published in eLife]
More than 50 journals and scientific organizations produce a wide variety of plain-language summaries that are available for research in many different areas of science and medicine. Plain-language summaries can help biomedical science journals to reach patients and others who may benefit from the research. This diversity means that there will always be something available to all those interested in science, regardless of their scientific background. … Read More →
Are we in the GSM Radar?
Google Scholar Metrics (GSM) offers alternative metrics to the JCR Impact Factor and the SJR, namely the h-5 index. To enter this world ranking that covers more than 40,000 journals it is only necessary to publish an average of 20 articles per year and be cited. However, there are hundreds of journals (our journals) that are not being indexed in GSM. They’re off Radar. … Read More →
I wrote this… I did not write this… now I write something else…
The emerging system of online scholarly communication incorporates a technological and ideologically approach different from the traditional one, where the articles initially appear as preprints versions and are modified until reaching the final version. In case of errors, these same technologies provide efficient opportunities to make partial or total corrections and even retractions, associating to the path of a document the history of its versions. It is time, therefore, to establish methodologies that allow to obtain the maximum of more updated information to support the scientific undertakings. … Read More →
Internationalization as an indicator of journal performance in Brazil: the case of Psychology
The path to strengthening scientific publications almost always goes through internationalization. Publishing in English, however, is not enough to reach a truly global audience and indices comparable to the most prestigious journals. A study on the degree of internationalization of Brazilian psychology journals shows how to walk this path. … Read More →
In memoriam: Eugene Garfield – 1925-2017
The father of Scientometrics died at 91 years old on February 27, 2017 leaving a production of more than 1.000 papers and communications over 60 years of research. … Read More →
SciELO Preprints on the way
The main objective of SciELO Preprints is to speeding up the availability of research results and will contribute to an organized flow of potentially acceptable preprints by SciELO journals, in line with the advances and growing importance of preprints publication internationally. The cooperative construction of the SciELO Preprints modus operandi will encompass the promotion and debate of the preprints concept, the definition of governance and operations structures and the operational implementation. It is expected to be fully operational by mid-2018. … Read More →
Assessment of reproducibility in research results leads to more questions than answers
The ‘Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology’ initiative that has the purpose of assessing the reproducibility of preclinical research in Oncology was launched in 2013 as the result of a collaboration between the Center for Open Science and Science Exchange. The first results of the replication studies have just been published, however, their interpretation requires a careful approach. … Read More →
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