The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced that it will no longer fund APCs for open access journals and is prioritizing the adoption of preprints. A series of recent posts discusses how the Gates Foundation’s announcement has resonated with the scientific community, prompting considerations about open access and its forms of funding, peer review and ultimately, how these changes influence the evaluation and integrity of research. … Read More →
Paper mills
Paper mills have begun to produce and sell large numbers of low-quality articles with false or plagiarized data. And, more recently, they are trying to entice journal editors by offering generous sums in exchange for the rapid acceptance of articles and by offering questionable editors and reviewers for special issues. … Read More →
How to reformulate scholarly publishing to face the peer review crisis
The time between submission and publication of articles in the field of microbiology has been increasing in recent years. In addition, editors are having to invite more and more reviewers to identify those willing to evaluate manuscripts. What are the implications of this for peer review? Available in Portuguese only. … Read More →
The scientific community is publishing (much) more and that’s a problem
A study posted on arXiv reports an exponential increase in the number of refereed scientific articles published in recent years, disproportionately outstripping the increase in the number of researchers. Scientific output per researcher as author, reviewer, and editor has increased dramatically, a phenomenon referred to as “pressure on scientific publication”, classified as a problem to be identified and resolved. Available in Portuguese only. … 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 →
Funders support use of reviewed preprints in research assessment [Originally published by eLife in December/2022]
Funders and other research organisations are embracing reviewed preprints as an alternative way to assess researchers, and call on others to do the same. … Read More →
Research assessment should go beyond comparing impact metrics
The assessment of research results that mainly relies on citation-based metrics has limitations that lead to distortions in the management of human and financial resources in research institutions around the world. The innovative Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, created by the initiative of the European Commission and organizations from this continent with the support of 350 public and private organizations from more than 40 countries, has just been published, and establishes criteria that value qualitative assessment and limit the use of quantitative indicators. … Read More →
Scholarly publishing and electric cars: A comment on “The big idea: should we get rid of the scientific paper?”
The big idea: should we get rid of the academic paper?, published in the Guardian, argues that because scholarly publishing is an old practice and because it’s flawed, it should be replaced by something more “modern”. Glenn Hampson, Executive Director of the Science Communication Institute (SCI) and Program Director of the Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) comments on the article. … Read More →
A comment on “The big idea: should we get rid of the scientific paper?”
In The big idea: should we get rid of the scientific paper?, published in The Guardian, Stuart Ritchie argues for a radical action: scientists should abandon the current format of the scientific paper, which is static and not interactive. Adeilton Brandão, Editor in Chief of Memorias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz and researcher at Fiocruz, comments on the article. … Read More →
Measuring and comparing Brazilian and Latin-American universities in terms of academic and industry related knowledge production
The use of the multidimensional academic ranking U-Multirank to compare academic and industry-related knowledge production of Brazilian Universities with other Latin American countries, shows that, while Brazil leads in number of academic publications, Chile is ahead in both citation numbers and patents awarded, with Brazil lagging behind in these Indicators’ world averages. … 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 →
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 →
The role of review articles goes beyond synthesizing current knowledge about a research topic
Review articles, besides helping to keep researchers updated on specific topics, play an important role in the curation of academic works and can influence emerging research topics through citation patterns. … 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 →
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