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 →
Towards open science, Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz welcome submission of preprint manuscripts
Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz is now accepting submission of manuscripts that are in preprint format. This decision follows the recent initiative by SciELO in launching a preprint service and it is aligned to the global movement of open science. This new modality of dissemination of scientific research results will break paradigms and certainly change the way science is measured today. It represents a small step for editors, but a huge leap in scientific communication for society. … Read More →
The Center for Open Science, alternative to Elsevier, announces new preprint services [Originally published in Ithaka S+R blog in August/2017]
As commercial providers buy and build their way into the institutional repository and preprint marketplace, the not-for-profit Center for Open Science (COS) is offering an alternative by expanding what it calls the preprint services it powers through its platform. … Read More →
What will peer review be like in 2030?
Although the scientific literature has always been reviewed before it was published, current forms of peer review are only a few decades old and from the outset have been subjected to criticism and limitations. Open review and preprints servers have emerged in recent years as possible solutions in a world of growing communication in scientific research. Open reviews, artificial intelligence, collaborative and “cloud” reviews… what will peer review be like in 2030? … Read More →
SciELO Preprints on the way
The main objective of SciELO Preprints is to speeding up the availability of research results and will contribute to an organized flow of potentially acceptable preprints by SciELO journals, in line with the advances and growing importance of preprints publication internationally. The cooperative construction of the SciELO Preprints modus operandi will encompass the promotion and debate of the preprints concept, the definition of governance and operations structures and the operational implementation. It is expected to be fully operational by mid-2018. … Read More →
Preprints – the way forward for rapid and open knowledge sharing
Preprints – versions of academic articles that have not yet been formally peer-reviewed before publication – are gaining acceptance in the academic world. They deliver open access as well as speedy publication, and their decades old success in physics has spurred on their spread in other disciplines. The development of preprints is accelerating; important funding agencies are in support of them, and also SciELO is planning to set up a preprint server for authors in Latin America and the Global South generally. … Read More →
Open Access article processing charges: a new serial publication crisis?
The financial and ethical implications that emerge from open access publishing through article processing fees in India are analyzed in a study that proposes the creation of a national open access journal platform such as SciELO in order to reduce costs, increase efficiency and facilitate the sharing of metadata among repositories. … Read More →
What’s the deal with preprints?
Preprints enable scholarly communication more quickly, complement traditional publication in academic journals and determine priorities. This procedure may change the peer review system and focus on the role of academic journals. … Read More →
Is the reproducibility crisis exacerbated by pre-publication peer review?
A lack of scrutiny of articles published in peer-reviewed journals on the basis of a belief that pre-publication peer-review provides sufficient scrutiny, may well add to the relatively high number of articles in which results are presented that cannot be replicated. … Read More →
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