The e-book Global report shows that the traditional model based on large publishing houses was insufficient to incorporate the possibilities of technological advances. On the one hand, the new reading models through smartphones and subscription platforms and on the other hand, self-publishing of ebooks open opportunities to both individual authors and non-profit organizations in the educational field to produce and distribute their own works at low cost and minimal infrastructure requirements. … Read More →
How Open Access can boost researchers’ careers
Full adoption of open access has not been achieved mainly because researchers are not yet totally convinced that this type of publication will do for their careers the same as the subscription journals. A detailed review article published in eLife shows that open research brings many benefits to researchers and it is associated with increased citations, media attention, potential collaboration and funding and jobs opportunities. … Read More →
eBooks – global market and trends – Part II: The publication of printed and digital books in the world context
The Global report on ebooks shows that after several years of growth, commercial companies find a decelerated market, where two lines of action strongly emerge: (a) the digitizing of educational books; and (b) books self-publishing initiatives. In this market stands out the ‘four horsemen’ initiatives that shape the digital ecology, integrated by Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook. … Read More →
International course updated SciELO network professionals on the new methodological platform
The SciELO network collections of national quality journals operate in a decentralized manner in 15 countries following common objectives, principles, methodologies and technologies. To achieve the main objective of contributing to improving the quality, visibility, use and impact of the journals, the network promotes the development of skills and scientific communication national infrastructures following the state of the art and has as a principle to maximize the interoperability of journals and articles on the Web. Thus, one of the most recent advances in the operational platform of SciELO collections is the adoption of full texts structure in XML, which motivated the updating course on the methodological platform, held in June 6-10 in São Paulo, with the participation of 16 representatives from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay, Spain and Uruguay. … Read More →
eBooks – global market and trends – Part I: Print and digital publication in the global context
In recent years, a global industry of electronic books (ebooks) has emerged, with great force in the English language market and remarkable strength in the United States. There are indicators showing a race between traditional publishing industries and also global players such as Amazon and non-traditional ones, such as authors publishing individually and independently. A recent report published last April, divided into four major sections, presents detailed statistics on the production and market of ebooks from large and medium companies throughout the world, which are the debates and key factors that are shaping the legal and pirate markets, and it also includes a “yellow pages” section, with more than 350 companies dedicated to various services and components in the electronic book chain edition. … Read More →
Zika Fast Track
How can scientific journals assist in the response to Public Health Emergencies? The journal Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz has innovated by creating a fast track for manuscripts submitted on the topic of the Zika Virus. The fast track procedure allows manuscripts to be posted on-line within 24 hours of submission making the data within them available to reader scrutiny and sharing while the manuscripts undergo peer-review. The journal is already reaping some benefits from this approach. … Read More →
The best of both worlds
Quality is an ill-defined concept with regard to scholarly literature. Some aspects of quality can be assessed reasonably objectively, and immediately, such as the quality of presentation. But some cannot be readily determined, and need time and ‘digestion’ by the scholarly community, such as the scientific quality of an article. And then there is the quality of a journal’s service to authors, of particular importance for open access publishing that is supported by Article Processing Charges. Also relevant is the question whether a strong focus on quality and excellence is indeed beneficial to science, or not. I am providing a link to an article on that most interesting topic. … Read More →
Open Access reviewed: stricter criteria preserve credibility
The most comprehensive index of open access journals, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), reviewed its inclusion criteria, in view of allegations of the presence of predatory journals. This restructuring will lead to more than 3,000 journals to be removed from the database. DOAJ, besides advocating Open Access, established, in collaboration with COPE, OASPA and WAME, a code of principles and good practices in scientific publishing. … Read More →
The search for scientific literature: how readers discover content
What are the sources most used by researchers and other professionals to search and access scholarly literature? A detailed study conducted by experts in publication and management of scientific journals, published in March 2016, aimed to answer this question. Through a survey with over 40,000 readers worldwide, the authors built a broad overview of users’ reading habits, comparing those with results from the last ten years. … Read More →
The adoption of English among SciELO Brazil journals has been increasing
The adoption of the English language is one of the advances that SciELO is promoting in order to increase the insertion, visibility and international impact of journals and the research they communicate. In recent years, the adoption of English has growing consistently among SciELO journals, which, from 2014 reached the milestone of publishing more in English than in Portuguese. The expectation of SciELO is that in the 2 to 3 forthcoming years 75% of the articles will be published in English and 40 to 50% in Portuguese. … Read More →
SciELO in the major discovery services
All SciELO journal articles and eBooks are now covered by the major international Discovery Services which serve to locate and provide access to scientific information, and offer academic libraries the required tools for their academic, research and student communities. The Discovery Services have a specific focus on materials identified as relevant to the academic, research, educational, and learning communities. This advancement will contribute to enhancing the visibility and interoperability of SciELO indexed content. … Read More →
From the NY Times: Biologists went rogue and publish directly on the Internet
The ASAP Bio conference held in February at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, US, brought together biomedicine researchers to discuss new ways to communicate research results using preprints and post-publication peer review. Renowned scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners started to deposit their articles in open access preprint repositories before proceeding with the formal publication in journals. The topic received last week the attention of the New York Times. … Read More →
Reproducibility in research results: the challenges of attributing reliability
Recently projects have been developed with the aim to reproduce published research results in psychology, biology and economics to verify their reliability. The results indicate different degrees of reproducibility in each area, however, they served to alert the scientific community about how fragile results considered irrefutable can be and reflect on the role of science in self-correcting. … Read More →
On the dangers of SciHub and hybrid journals
Changes and developments in the way things are done are sometimes seen as threatening, as dangers. That is a natural, instinctive reaction, perhaps, but sometimes, the danger lies not so much in the development itself as in the things that the development in question prevents. There are two developments in science publishing and science communication that are seen as dangerous by many. Both developments are seen as threatening from opposite sides of the fence, so to speak. … Read More →
FAIR guiding principles published in journal of the Nature Publishing Group family
The FAIR principles provide at a high level of abstraction a precise and measurable set of qualities for research data publication and reuse – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). These principles address the increasing need of rigorous data management stewardship applicable to both human and computational users which will soon become a core activity within contemporary research projects in Open Science environments. … Read More →
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