Instructions to authors (IA) allegedly contain all necessary and sufficient information to guide authors on the correct submission of a manuscript to a journal. Actually, however, a huge diversity of contents not always fulfills that purpose. In this post, we analyze the instructions to authors of SciELO Brazil Health Science journals, as well as literature on the subject. … Read More →
How Open Access can boost researchers’ careers
Full adoption of open access has not been achieved mainly because researchers are not yet totally convinced that this type of publication will do for their careers the same as the subscription journals. A detailed review article published in eLife shows that open research brings many benefits to researchers and it is associated with increased citations, media attention, potential collaboration and funding and jobs opportunities. … Read More →
The best of both worlds
Quality is an ill-defined concept with regard to scholarly literature. Some aspects of quality can be assessed reasonably objectively, and immediately, such as the quality of presentation. But some cannot be readily determined, and need time and ‘digestion’ by the scholarly community, such as the scientific quality of an article. And then there is the quality of a journal’s service to authors, of particular importance for open access publishing that is supported by Article Processing Charges. Also relevant is the question whether a strong focus on quality and excellence is indeed beneficial to science, or not. I am providing a link to an article on that most interesting topic. … Read More →
From the NY Times: Biologists went rogue and publish directly on the Internet
The ASAP Bio conference held in February at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, US, brought together biomedicine researchers to discuss new ways to communicate research results using preprints and post-publication peer review. Renowned scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners started to deposit their articles in open access preprint repositories before proceeding with the formal publication in journals. The topic received last week the attention of the New York Times. … Read More →
Reproducibility in research results: the challenges of attributing reliability
Recently projects have been developed with the aim to reproduce published research results in psychology, biology and economics to verify their reliability. The results indicate different degrees of reproducibility in each area, however, they served to alert the scientific community about how fragile results considered irrefutable can be and reflect on the role of science in self-correcting. … Read More →
On the dangers of SciHub and hybrid journals
Changes and developments in the way things are done are sometimes seen as threatening, as dangers. That is a natural, instinctive reaction, perhaps, but sometimes, the danger lies not so much in the development itself as in the things that the development in question prevents. There are two developments in science publishing and science communication that are seen as dangerous by many. Both developments are seen as threatening from opposite sides of the fence, so to speak. … Read More →
FAIR guiding principles published in journal of the Nature Publishing Group family
The FAIR principles provide at a high level of abstraction a precise and measurable set of qualities for research data publication and reuse – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). These principles address the increasing need of rigorous data management stewardship applicable to both human and computational users which will soon become a core activity within contemporary research projects in Open Science environments. … Read More →
May excessive transparency damage Science?
The scholarly community promoted and encouraged research transparency to curb the lack of reproducibility and scientific misconduct. However, this openness also opens room for attacks and harassment of researchers, often motivated by simple discrepancy between the results and even threats of physical and psychological violence. Learn how to recognize and protect yourself from attacks of this nature. … Read More →
Coupling Pre-Prints and Post-Publication Peer Review for Fast, Cheap, Fair, and Effective Science Publishing [Originally published in Michael Eisen’s blog “it is not junk”]
Leslie Vosshall and Michael Eisen have written the following white paper as a prelude to the upcoming ASAP Bio meeting in February aimed at promoting pre-print use in biomedicine. We would greatly value any comments, questions or concerns you have about the piece or what we are proposing. … Read More →
Are ‘predatory’ journals completely negative, or also a sign of something positive?
Something that is generally, and justifiably, considered negative, can, however, also be a harbinger of an underlying positive development. The case in point is the existence of so-called ‘predatory’ journals, which have – inevitably – emerged in an environment in which a true market for scientific publishing services is slowly taking shape. … Read More →
Openness and quality of a published article
Openness is a scientifically and societally relevant part of a published article’s quality. It is time that openness is recognized as a most important element of the quality of a research publication and that those who judge researchers on their publications (e.g. tenure and promotion committees) take that into account. For the benefit of science and the benefit of society as a whole. … Read More →
Annotating the scholarly literature online
The Internet irreversibly changed the scholarly literature, the way it is published, assessed, disseminated, read, shared and cited. The peer review process has been evolving as a result of innovations facilitated by the Web. Among them, the post-publication review and open comments on online texts constitute a strong trend. Hypothes.is is an open source initiative that allows sharing openly – or privately – comments from researchers on scientific publications, contributing to their improvement. … Read More →
How to assess research proposals?
The peer review of research proposals (grants) aims to judge the merit of projects and researchers and enable the best to be contemplated. The director of an institution in the United Kingdom shared on Twitter his struggle in evaluating the numerous proposals received and started a discussion forum from which ideas and suggestions emerged. … Read More →
Bibliometric indicators of the European scientific production
Europe brings together many countries leaders in scientific and technological research and has encouraged cooperation programs between institutions, countries and regions to foster competitiveness, impact and relevance in research. A comprehensive study based on bibliometric indices analyzes the scientific output of the region and appraises its contribution to the realization of the European Research Area. … Read More →
Science (which needs communication) first, careers (which need selectivity) later
Science communication and career advancement via journal publications are too closely intertwined, to the detriment of science. The selectivity of journals slows, hampers, and distorts the communication process. Therefore, the processes of scientific communication and assessment for career advancement should be separated. As a welcome side effect, publishing, particularly publishing with open access, could be very much cheaper than it is currently (and the money saved used for research). … Read More →
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