Is the growing number of scientific retractions necessarily due to the fruits of pseudoscience? Productive reflection on the subject leads us to the need to recognize the current demands of the scientific system for researchers, conflicts of interests at stake and that science is produced by fallible human beings with their own moral values . Globalization, while supporting misconduct, strengthens social control. Increased retraction of papers is a necessary response of the social control to what some authors refer to as “pseudoscience”. … Read More →
Latin-American repositories have little visibility in Google Scholar
A recent study concerning the visibility of Latin American scholarly output in open access repositories reveals their poor indexing in Google and Google Scholar. The technical reasons for these problems, which affect the visibility of Latin-American research which, for the most part, is not indexed in either in WoS or Scopus, are explained in this post. … Read More →
Editorial ethics – good and bad scientific practices
III BRISPE: Brazilian Meeting on Research Integrity, Science and Publication Ethics, sponsored by FAPESP, was the third event held in Brazil with the objective to promote institutional policies and practices of ethical research integrity and responsible conduct. With the presence of several prestigious guests from developed countries, the education strategies to new scientists were analyzed as well as how to reduce bad practices such falsification of data, plagiarism, conflict of interests, manipulation of results, etc. … Read More →
Social networks and scientific journalism: a challenge to editors
In an interview to the Blog SciELO in Perspective, Jaime L. Benchimol discusses the use of social networks and scientific journalism as a challenge to publishers. He shares his experience and presents the history and challenges of História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, pointing out: “You have to equip yourself properly and, as important as gaining the support of funding agencies, is to convince the leaders of universities and institutions that scientific journals are indispensable and are costly and complex and cannot be made by improvisations and voluntarism of some selfless”. … Read More →
SciELO participates in the Global coalition supporting Creative Commons licenses to access journal articles
The STM International Association launched a series of new licensing models for open access contents. Its release caused a massive reaction from the scientific community and numerous organizations in the form of an open letter called Coalition Letter on STM Model Licenses, which so far gathered 83 organizations, including SciELO. The signatories understand that already established Creative Commons licenses cover a wide spectrum of possibilities, and that open access dispense new licenses. … Read More →
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 →
Profile of researchers that integrate the core of world science publishing
A limited number of researchers all over the world can keep a continuous and uninterrupted flow of publications over time. This ability is shared by only 1% of researchers, who form the core of most productive and cited scientists. The inability to maintain this flow is translated into less scientific impact. … Read More →
Ethical publishing – should plagiarized pieces be retracted ? – well, perhaps not all
An article that contains sections of texts copied from other sources (plagiarism) does not necessarily make its research bad or invalid. Even though this is a warning of unethical behavior, this does not always merit the rejection or retraction of the article concerned. This is the opinion published recently in an article in Nature. … Read More →
What can alternative metrics – or altmetrics – offer us?
The results and comments in four articles dedicated to altmetrics and published in an issue of EPI are analyzed. They show future possibilities and the real difficulties in the development of a new technique for the measurement of the impact of research based on social networks on the web. … Read More →
The SciELO journals are being improved by the adoption of classic workflows relating to the online management of article submissions
Together with the journals that it indexes, SciELO is fostering the improvement of the management of the evaluation of article submissions in order to help overcome the various difficulties faced by the journals, and to strengthen the transparency of the processes. Part of this initiative is the use of automated management systems that organize the functions of the parties involved in the evaluation of article submissions, allow for the monitoring of the workflows and provide statistics on the corresponding activities, with a view to steering the systematic improvement of the processes. This post analyzes three classic workflows in the automated management of article submissions adopted by a group of SciELO journals whose promising results show the viability of SciELO’s strategy. … Read More →
The SciELO in Perspective blog celebrates its first year
Social networks are an integral part of the scholarly communication process, acting as they do as sources of access to curated information, as a medium of dissemination and marketing, and as sources of the so called altmetrics that measure the visibility and influence of research on the Web. The adoption of social networks by the SciELO journals is a priority of the SciELO Program in its professionalization and internationalization action lines. In July 2014, the blog SciELO in Perspective celebrated it first successful year of operation, and is defining itself as the common blog platform for the SciELO journals. … Read More →
Author credits …. Credited for what?
When the publication of a scientific article has been the joint responsibility of dozens of people, the following questions can arise: Who is the author? How is credit apportioned? and Does everyone have the same level of responsibility? A recent editorial in Nature puts forward a taxonomy which can be used to categorize the different roles which come together to make up the concept of authorship. It is interesting to make a comparison with how the film industry addresses this issue when apportioning credits in the awarding of Oscars. … Read More →
The Open Data movement: international consolidation
The open data movement – the availability of scientific research data for preservation, searching, using and citing – is gaining followers in all sectors of the academic world, and with editors, publishers, research institutions and funding agencies. The movement will allow greater interoperability, transparency, visibility and research impact, in addition to ensuring the digital preservation of the original data that would otherwise have a tendency to be lost or become inaccessible with the passage of time. … Read More →
South America science in Nature
The celebrated journal Nature devotes a special section of its June 11 issue to an analysis of South American research output, highlighting areas of excellence and innovation which are internationally recognized, and fields of collaboration with other countries both inside and outside the region. The articles in this section stress the economic and infrastructural inequalities within the region, as well as the low levels of investment in research and development, and point to FAPESP as a successful model of investment directly linked to a state’s GDP. … Read More →
What are the Public Library of Science Collections ? – Part II
This post is the second part of the description of the contents of the PLOS Collections. Of the seven collections that makeup PLOS Collections, the Text Mining and Altmetrics collections have been selected for a brief analysis of their contents and their importance to scientometrics and information science, and of the growth of these disciplines that are bolstered by free access to full text. … Read More →
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