As of this year, Revista DADOS will have an editorial department specifically set up to deal with issues of the replicability of its articles. This commitment included a break with essayism in favor of a more systematic research view, which led to the publication of manuscripts strongly supported by empirical evidence. … Read More →
Artificial Intelligence and research communication
Are chatbots really authors of scientific articles? Can they be legally responsible, make ethical decisions? What do scientific societies, journal editors and universities say? Can their results be included in original scientific articles? Based on recent contributions hereby presented, we’ll be publishing posts that will try to answer these questions and any new ones that arise. … Read More →
Shuffle the cards and deal again
Research must be well planned, carried out correctly and reported in a clear and transparent way, as the reliability of the results depends on the rigor of the experimental design. However, in the published reports, there seems to be a lack of commitment by those responsible for assessing the quality of the research. Experts pointed out that the current incentive structures in research institutions do not sufficiently encourage researchers to invest in solidity and transparency, instead encouraging them to optimize their aptitude in the fight for publications and grants. Over the past decade, large-scale replication studies have shown that reproducibility is far from favorable in many scientific fields, and questionable research practices are becoming more prevalent. Clearly something is not working in the scientific enterprise. … Read More →
Open Science in the Humanities
Following the event Open Science in the Humanities, organized by SciELO in partnership with the representatives of the area in the Advisory Committee, Luiz Augusto Campos and Bernardo Buarque de Hollanda, a brief description and balance of the main thematic axes debated was made, emphasizing at the end the importance of dialogue between the editors of the different subareas, establishing interchanges, elucidating doubts and highlighting strengths and weaknesses in the challenges of implementing open science, according to the consideration of the specificities and diversity of the contemplated journals. … Read More →
Open Code Community: an open platform for research code sharing
The sharing of research codes is a common practice among members of the scientific community. However, such sharing is usually restricted to members of the academy itself. Here comes the Open Code Community project, which seeks to integrate academic and market participants in the sharing of research codes. … Read More →
How the rhetoric of excellence influences research evaluation
Academic institutions advertise their teaching and research programs associated with prominent positions in university rankings, or names that are synonymous with success, prestige, and reputation. This post reviews an article that shows how the “rhetoric of excellence” is used in the academic world and favors the lack of reproducibility, fraud and the ineffective distribution of research grants and proposes strategies to overcome it. … Read More →
The latest blows from predatory (or pirate) journals
Piracy and, specifically, scams by predatory publishers are growing around the world, becoming a growing concern in academic publishing, drawing the attention of the most serious publishers. This problem is not so serious in Latin American scientific publications. Post available only in Spanish. … Read More →
Comments on convenience authorship [Originally published as the editorial in Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências vol. 93 no. 3]
One of the consequences of this pandemic is the increase of submission of scientific articles that has raised concerns about their quality. Along with this come authorship issues, such as convenience authorship, which should also appear on the editors’ radar because of the potential deleterious consequences that could affect the new generation of scientists. … Read More →
Sex and gender equity in research and publication
On June 8, 2021, ABEC Brasil promoted, with the support of the SciELO Program, the webinar “Sex and gender equity in research and publication”. Taught by Dr. Shirin Heidari, founder of the European Association of Scientific Editors (EASE) Gender Policy Committee, lead author of the SAGER (Sex and Gender Equity in Research) guidelines and founding President of GENDRO, the webinar discussed, among other issues, why sex and gender matter in research and reporting, and what editors, reviewers and authors can do to improve gender-sensitive reporting. … Read More →
A perspective on ethical and regulatory aspects of research involving humans in the COVID-19 pandemic
The last day of 2019 marked the official start of a major change on the planet, which “… turned the world upside down. Everything has been impacted…” When it comes to science in the COVID-19 pandemic, research involving humans has been in the spotlight, with greater exposure of its relevance and of the ethical challenges posed at the science and society interface, which has been heavily impacted by the pandemic. … Read More →
Scientific rigor and open science: ethical and methodological challenges in qualitative research
The literature demonstrates growing criticism of the reliability of qualitative research, including claims that it lacks rigor and methodological clarity. In the publication system, several actions reflect this increased attention to rigor. Initiatives by major research funding agencies also emphasize rigor. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), for example, has fostered efforts to promote strategies to increase rigor and transparency in the reporting of results of qualitative research. Here, we offer a brief panorama, permeated by transformations that include increasing initiatives to promote open science. We explore some questions about the current discussion of scientific rigor, not only in publications, but also in proposing qualitative research projects. … Read More →
Open but Unfair – The role of social justice in Open Access publishing [Originally published in the LSE Impact blog in October/2020]
Stage one of the Open Access (OA) movement promoted the democratization of scholarly knowledge, making work available so that anybody could read it. However, publication in highly ranked journals is becoming very costly, feeding the same vendor capitalists that OA was designed to sidestep. In this Q&A, Simon Batterbury argues that when prestige is valued over publication ethics, a paradoxical situation emerges where conversations about social justice take place in unjust journals. Academic freedom and integrity are at risk unless Open Access becomes not simply about the democratization of knowledge, but the ethics of its publication too. … Read More →
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak highlights serious deficiencies in scholarly communication [Originally published in the LSE Impact blog in March/2020]
As research and government responses to the COVID-19 outbreak escalate in the face of a global public health crisis, Vincent Larivière, Fei Shu and Cassidy R. Sugimoto reflect on efforts to make research on this subject more widely available. Arguing that a narrow focus on research published in high ranking journals predominantly in English has impeded research efforts, they suggest that the renewed emphasis on carrying out open research on the virus presents an opportunity to reassess how research and scholarly communication systems serve the public good. … Read More →
Sorbonne declaration on research data rights [Originally published in the LERU website in January/2020]
The opening of research data is one of the practices of open science that is progressively being globalized. In November 2019, the Network of Scientific Data Repositories of the State of São Paulo, formed by eight universities and research institutions, was launched. In January 2020, leaders of eight university networks gathered at the International Research Data Rights Summit at Sorbonne Université signed the Sorbonne Declaration on Research Data Rights, which is reproduced in this post in the original English version. … Read More →
CRediT Check – Should we welcome tools to differentiate the contributions made to academic papers? [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in January/2020]
Elsevier is the latest in a lengthening list of publishers to announce their adoption for 1,200 journals of the CASRAI Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT). Authors of papers in these journals will be required to define their contributions in relation to a predefined taxonomy of 14 roles. In this post, Elizabeth Gadd weighs the pros and cons of defining contributorship in a more prescriptive fashion and asks whether there is a risk of incentivising new kinds of competitive behaviour and forms of evaluation that doesn’t benefit researchers. … Read More →
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