In this conversation, Abel Packer traces SciELO Program’s growth and talks about the gap in publication standards and processes between developed and developing countries. He also emphasizes the importance of establishing sustainable open access publication models. [Available only in English] … Read More →
The “Salvador Declaration on Open Access: the developing world perspective” completes 10 years
Open Access promotes equity. For the developing world Open Access will increase scientists and academics capacity to both access and contribute to world science. After 10 year the Salvador Declaration promoted by SciELO remains actual. … Read More →
France prepares bill to regulate open access
France is preparing a bill to regulate open access to scientific research results financed with public funds. The text of the law, however, does not agree with what the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) believes it benefits the scientific community, the French and the world society. The project is available for public consultation and any Internet user can suggest changes that will impact on the way research is conveyed digitally. Your feedback is very important, vote you too. … Read More →
The publishing proposal of the Open Library of Humanities [Originally published in The Impact Factor Blog]
The Open Library of Humanities (openlibhums.org) is no longer a project. On September 28th, 2015 the mega-journal for humanities and the social sciences came into existence, and at the same time a new funding model. … Read More →
Project Making Data Count encourages sharing of research data
Sharing of research data (open data) is increasing in all areas related to scientific research, and it involves authors, journals, publishers, funding agencies, the productive sector and society. In order to encourage authors to provide and reuse datasets, it is paramount to find ways to measure their impact. The initiative ‘Making Data Count’ is efficiently doing this, find out how. … Read More →
The favourable perception of open access increases among researchers
A research conducted by the Nature Publishing Group indicates that the perception of open access (OA) publishing is rapidly changing among researchers. In 2014, 40% of authors who have not published in OA journals declared themselves concerned about the quality of publications, a percentage which fell to 27% in 2015. The NPG supports OA publications and recognizes its importance, publishing 56% of the articles in this format. … Read More →
What is holding back the transition to open access if it does not cost more?
Transition to Article Processing Charge supported open access from a closed access subscription system is far from straightforward, even if the cost of such an open access system is the same, or even less. There are glimmers of hope, though, in an approach that may help to overcome the hurdles, by taking a large-scale, even nationwide, approach as opposed to the usual one where each individual institution has to weigh up the costs and benefits. … Read More →
SciELO’s Contribution to the Globalization of Science [Originally published in Digital Science’s “Perspectives” blog]
SciELO was created in Brazil about two decades ago when international indexes limited their coverage to the so called main stream journals ignoring an universe of journals edited by regional publishers mainly from developing and non-English speaking countries. Aiming to increase the quality and visibility of world-class research communicated by these nationally edited peer reviewed journals, SciELO quickly emerged as an indexing and publishing model adopted by a network of 15 countries that covers over one thousand journals, more than 500 thousand articles that serve a daily average of more than 1 million downloads. SciELO contributes to the globalization of science and to the cultural enrichment of the international flow of scientific information. This post by the directors of SciELO was originally published on Digital Science’s blog, “Perspectives”. … Read More →
Rebuttal to the blog post “Is SciELO a Publication Favela?” authored by Jeffrey Beall
Editors of scientific journals sign note of rejection to Mr. Jeffrey Beall’s attempt of freely depreciate the successful image of SciELO. Read the note here http://peloscielo.org/#en. … Read More →
Open Access in Latin America: a paragon for the rest of the world [Originally published in the SPARC blog]
Manifesto signed by scholars and representatives of pro-open access associations, published on the website of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition – SPARC, repudiates the ideas advocated by Jeffrey Beall disqualifying SciELO (and Redalyc) in favor of control over journals by large commercial publishers. The manifesto states that open access is exemplary in Latin America. … Read More →
Motion to repudiate Mr. Jeffrey Beall’s classist attack on SciELO
By the Brazilian Forum of Public Health Journals Editors and the Associação Brasileira de Saúde Coletiva (Abrasco, Brazilian Public Health Association) … Read More →
Science Publishing: the Transition to Open Access Going Dutch
The negotiations between the Dutch universities (VSNU – the Association of Universities in The Netherlands) and three large publishers (Springer, Wiley, Sage) have been concluded and significant steps to include open access in the deals with those publishers have been made. With Elsevier, however, the negotiations are in deadlock, according to the VSNU. They have called for a boycott, but the real question is, of course, why it is that Elsevier, the largest, and Dutch (!) academic publisher, can’t – or won’t – do what other large publishers can – and will. I have no answer to that, but in trying to sketch the situation in some detail, I hope to add some clarity to it. The outcome of the negotiations is surely going to influence other countries. … Read More →
SciELO adopts CC-BY as main Open Access attribution
From 1st July 2015 the SciELO Program will adopt the Creative Commons license CC-BY as a standard of Open Access attribution to SciELO Brazil Collection. By this decision, SciELO aligns to the Open Access policies adopted by the leading journals and international publishers with the main purpose to increase and the options of access and reuse of the published articles. … Read More →
Can monies spent globally on journal subscriptions be completely transitioned to an OA business model to free the journals?
The recent rapid growth in open access publishing, and the clear benefits that open access presents to society as a whole leads to the question: can all subscription based scientific journals in the world be transitioned to open access in a sustainable way? Is there enough money currently in the system for such a transition, and would there be any economic impact? A recent eye-opening study published by the Max Planck Digital Library delves into this issue and provides some very concrete answers based on real expenditures in subscriptions and on the real costs of open access services. … Read More →
Could grant proposal reviews be made available openly?
Researchers have been discussing what would be the impact of making the review process of grant proposals more open and transparent, in order to support the preparation of better proposals and acknowledge the work of the reviewers. A recently published paper in Nature examines the impact of two articles on the open availability of the review of research proposals and the possibility of changing the assessment after publication of the results. … Read More →
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