In this blog, Robert Kiley and Michael Markie, discuss the ambition behind creating Wellcome Open Research, an innovative funder led publishing platform, and assess the success of the platform over its first two years. Going on to imagine a future, in which all research is published using the principles behind Wellcome Open Research, they suggest the potential benefits such a publishing system would have for research and research assessment. … Read More →
Is a dramatic boost to open access imminent? I think so!
Recent developments, such as Plan S, a funder mandate for grantees to publish their findings with open access, as well as the growth in preprints – in terms of number of articles posted as well as preprint services becoming available – are bound to have a major impact on the amount of new scientific journal literature being openly and freely accessible by anyone, anywhere. … Read More →
Scientific Publishing Innovations: the Future of Journals and Peer Review
On the first day of SciELO 20 Years Week, during the WG5 – Scientific Publishing Innovations and the Future of Peer Review and Journals, new methodologies for opening the publishing process using preprints servers were discussed throughout the day before an audience of more than 50 people and presentations of six experts. Text available only in Spanish. … Read More →
Plan S — and Article Processing Charges (APCs)
Recently, in Europe, a plan has been launched to accelerate the transition to open access. It is called Plan S. Its key principle is stated as follows: “After 1 January 2020 scientific publications on the results from research funded by public grants provided by national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.” Some issues are highlighted, especially the issue of the cost of APCs, and some suggestions for possible improvement of Plan S are given. … Read More →
PKP and SciELO announce development of open source Preprint Server system
In commemoration of SciELO’s 20th anniversary, the Public Knowledge Project is joining with SciELO to collaborate on developing a multilingual and multidisciplinary Preprint Server system, based on Open Journal Systems, that will be integrated into and serve the SciELO community of journals. … Read More →
Open Access and open science: a historic opportunity
The open access movement in Latin America has a historic opportunity to connect with other practices, tools and experiences of open science – open data, open parts evaluation, open laboratory notebooks, open software and free hardware – and invite other actors to participate and share their contributions to science. … Read More →
The basics of content types: Preprints, Crossmark, translations, and more
What’s the difference between preprints and ahead of print? When should you use each; and, what are the DOI requirements? This article answers those questions and provides a basic overview of how to connect the metadata records of related content types, like translations. … Read More →
What does a new approach mean (for journals, research councils)?
Preprints are a development underway in science communication and publishing. For journals, this has consequences. They may adopt a passive role, an opposing stance, or an encouraging, stimulating role, and see it as an opportunity, placing their journal in the midst of the preprint development. These are issues to be discussed in detail at the SciELO 20 Years Conference in September 2018. … Read More →
How long does it take to do science? The emergence of time in scholarly communication
Scholarly communication has undergone great transformations in the last two decades, mainly due to the popularization of new information technologies, which imposes a new regime of time and speed in scientific publishing. However, these changes are not just responses to technological advances. These are more complex issues related to the reconfiguration of academic work and changes on the paradigm of communication and the difficulties and challenges faced by editors and researchers over time management. … Read More →
Communication and peer review should be universally separated
The SciELO 20 Years Week will promote an ample and open forum on the future of scientific communication and journals. There is a discussion group for each topic of the SciELO 20 Years Conference. The discussion starts with this comment by Jan Velterop on the separation between communication and peer review posted in the discussion group of the Panel 3.1 that deals with fast communication via preprints and other means to accelerate the availability of research results. … Read More →
SciELO 20 Years Conference – an innovative and participative forum on the future of scholarly communication
The celebration of the 20 years of SciELO in 2018 will culminate with the Meeting of the SciELO Network and the SciELO 20 Years Conference, in the week of September 24th-28th. The Network Meeting will address the updates of the SciELO Publishing Model and the priority lines of action for the coming years. The SciELO 20 Years Conference will discuss 12 contemporary scientific communication themes. Each of these themes will be developed under the coordination of a scientific committee that will gather bibliographies, interviews, posts and articles that will guide the debates in the 20 Years Conference. … Read More →
Scientific communication practices in High Energy Physics: potential of preprints
The use of preprints repositories in High Energy Physics (HEP) to accelerate scientific communication dates back more than half a century, encouraging the practice of self-archiving and open access to research results. This report reflects on the potential of preprints in HEP scientific communication through the open access initiatives SPIRES and arXiv. The success of preprints repositories and databases in physics seems to have encouraged other areas to create their own thematic repositories, favoring the free circulation of information and discussion of scientific data. … Read More →
SciELO Indexing Criteria align with open science communication
The new SciELO Brazil Criteria are aligned with the good practices of open science communication. They become valid from January 2018 and project a new stage of improvement of Brazil’s scientific communication, which should be progressively extended to the other countries of the SciELO Network. The advancement towards open science has as a characteristic the repositioning of the main players of scholarly communication: authors, journals, and research funders. … Read More →
Of Subscriptions and Article Processing Charges
Article Processing Charges (APCs) – although they face criticism – do have advantages over subscriptions. They make immediate open access possible, but they also allow other drawbacks of subscriptions to be avoided, such as fixed page budgets. What APCs have not been able to do, is lower the financial burden of science communication on the research community, as many open access advocates had wanted and expected. A solution may be found – even if only a partial one – in the provision of preprints as a matter of course. … Read More →
The (pre) history of biology preprints
Some terms used currently with certain familiarity give us the false impression of having been coined in the light of the latest technology and inextricably linked to the Internet. Preprints repository is one such example. It seems impossible to devise a way of storing preliminary versions of scientific papers in a non-virtual space, let alone sharing them with as many stakeholders as possible otherwise than electronically. For that is exactly what happened in the unlikely year of 1961, when the NIH began circulating printed biology preprints to a list of subscribers in an experiment called the Information Exchange Groups. … Read More →
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