There has been an explosion in innovation and experimentation in peer review in the last five years. While the ideal of peer review is still needed, it is its implementation, and the present lack of any viable alternative, that must be looked at for improvement, based on three core traits that underpin any viable peer-review system: quality control and moderation, performance and engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. … Read More →
Peer review: journal recommendation to reviewers
Despite undergoing transformations to become more sustainable, fast, and efficient, peer review is the process that contributes to increasing the quality and reliability of scholarly communication. Few journals, however, provide their reviewers with detailed instructions on how to carry out this assessment in accordance with their editorial policy, which reduces the effectiveness and efficiency of the process. … Read More →
The Center for Open Science, alternative to Elsevier, announces new preprint services [Originally published in Ithaka S+R blog in August/2017]
As commercial providers buy and build their way into the institutional repository and preprint marketplace, the not-for-profit Center for Open Science (COS) is offering an alternative by expanding what it calls the preprint services it powers through its platform. … Read More →
Persistence and normalization of data were the main topics of the III SciELO-ScholarOne Updating Course
The III SciELO-ScholarOne Updating Course is a continuation of the SciELO Program’s commitment to raise the level of professionalism of its journals. The event took place at the FAPESP auditorium in São Paulo and brought together about 150 representatives from 70 SciELO journals seeking to improve their editorial management and had as main topics the persistence and normalization of data. … Read More →
Science is largely a collective enterprise. That collectivity needs to be recognized more explicitly
There is a disconnect between the collective nature of science, and the way the publishing and scholarly credit and reward systems focus very strongly on individual achievements. This results in problems that affect not only science, but society’s trust in science, and thus society as a whole. … Read More →
Texture – an open science manuscript editor [Originally published in eLife in July/2017]
The Substance project released in 24 July 2017 the Alpha3 version of the Texture editor, which reads and produces XML files according the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) used by SciELO to structure scientific texts. It is a major step towards a complete solution for editing JATS articles and its application in publishing workflows. … Read More →
What will peer review be like in 2030?
Although the scientific literature has always been reviewed before it was published, current forms of peer review are only a few decades old and from the outset have been subjected to criticism and limitations. Open review and preprints servers have emerged in recent years as possible solutions in a world of growing communication in scientific research. Open reviews, artificial intelligence, collaborative and “cloud” reviews… what will peer review be like in 2030? … Read More →
Editorial ethics – other types of plagiarism… and counting
Plagiarism and fraud multiply in a variety of ways. Recently two less frequent types have come up – accidental plagiarism and referee plagiarism. In any case, plagiarism is an ethical breach that erodes public confidence and we must prevent it. … Read More →
The editors’ role on peer review: how to identify bad referees
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 →
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