Just before celebrating the Open Access Week worldwide, a controversial article published on Science exposed the recurrent question of the weaknesses of the peer review process in scientific communication. The paper focus on the selection of journals which collect article processing fees and describes how 304 versions of a fictitious article containing serious and obvious flaws were accepted in 157 open access journals, many already considered predatory. This post describes the experiment and gathers comments from international blogs. … Read More →
Impact – Nature’s Viewpoint: comments on special issue 502 (7471) 17th October, 2013
The journal Impact Factor as measured by citations is a relevant yet insufficient measure in the evaluation of projects by national research funding agencies. Without denying this objective measure and the importance it has, a consensus is emerging that the social and economic impact of research funded by these agencies must also be evaluated. … 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 →
October: Open Access Celebration Month!
In October we celebrate 15 years of the SciELO! October is known as the month of open access. Worldwide have celebratory events! Let’s celebrate! … Read More →
The Evolution of Open Access: a brief history
Meet some key events in the evolution of Open Access, which already has a history that goes back over 30 years. … 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 →
SciELO 15 Years: scholarly communication, meetings, reunions, poetry and music
The advances, trends and innovations that are shaping the future of scholarly communication will be analyzed and discussed in SciELO 15 Years Conference in an environment conducive to the exchange of ideas and experiences, to meetings and reunions of researchers, students and professionals in information and scholarly communication, and representatives of public institutions and commercial companies as well. … 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 →
Publication ethics and the problem of plagiarism
Plagiarism in the academic environment not only violates an author’s copyright and moral rights, but is also unethical behavior which may justify the expulsion of the perpetrators from their institution. There are different forms of plagiarism which occur with differing frequencies. A recent report produced by the company iThenticate shows ten of the most common cases and their degree of seriousness. … Read More →
To the sound of music and brazilian poetry: A Barca, an unforgettable poetic record
Don’t miss the musical performance of the group A Barca on the evening of October 22 during the opening ceremony of the SciELO 15 Years Conference! A Barca’s works are inspired by the Brazilian poet Mário de Andrade. Music and poetry are brought together as common elements in the idea of passages, of restlessness and of the desire to bring together the riches from a lively Brazilian treasure. A truly unforgettable poetic record not to be forgotten! … Read More →
EVIPNet Brazil encourages a narrowing of the gap between scientific knowledge and health policies
The use of scientific research to provide advice for public health policies has been promoted in Brazil since 2007 by the Evidence-Informed Policy Network through the production and dissemination of evidence briefs for health policies. Resulting from a partnership between the Ministry of Health and BIREME/PAHO/WHO, EVIPNet seeks to increase the use of scientific knowledge in the Sistema Único de Saúde, Brazil’s Public Health System. … Read More →
A varied panorama of rankings
Currently there is a varied panorama of university rankings at different levels – international, regional and national – and the national ones show their importance by being more in tune with the national context than the international rankings, and even use additional sources to rank the Institutions of Higher Learning in their respective countries. … Read More →
From lists to rankings
Based on Umberto Eco’s book “The Vertigo of Lists”, this blog post recalls the historical origin of lists, discussing their evolution to today’s sophisticated technological artifacts of information organization, and culminating in the emergence of global hierarchical listings showing the positioning of universities, also known as rankings. … Read More →
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