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 →
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 →
Grim perspectives for Brazilian periodicals [Originally published as the editorial in Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências vol. 93 no. 1]
Covid-19 had devastating effects that go beyond economics and also affected the periodicals published in Brazil. An editorial of the Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências has called attention that no journal published in the country will receive any support from the funding agencies in 2021 and calls for relevant stakeholders to discuss solutions to avoid the collapse of the publication system that is approaching if no measures are taken. … Read More →
A look at peer review of grant proposals
The scholarly peer review tracking platform Publons has launched the Grant Review in Focus on project assessment and identification for funding. Four thousand and seven hundred researchers were interviewed as well as data extracted from Web of Science. … Read More →
Transparency: What Can One Learn from a Trove of Invoices? [Originally published in the Scholarly Kitchen blog in November/2019]
A new dataset from the Gates Foundation offers insights into author choices and APC pricing. … Read More →
Open Access Plans — S, T, U, so far
Things do seem to be moving in Open Access (OA). First there was Plan S, proposed by science funders in the European Union, then a proposal to fund OA from submission fees rather than article processing charges, (perhaps flippantly) called Plan T, and now, in alphabetical sequence, Plan U. All three have strong merits, but Plan U has the best chance of succeeding and offers the most to the scientific community. … Read More →
Wellcome Open Research, the future of scholarly communication? [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in February/2019]
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 →
SciELO, Open Infrastructure and Independence
SciELO has been a shining example of how a publicly supported infrastructure could bolster scholarship and knowledge as public goods. However, its increasingly focus on “professionalization” and “internationalization” may serve to reduce the intellectual and linguistic heterogeneity of the region, while subjecting the evaluation of quality to “standards” largely set by multinational corporations that are far more interested in profit extraction than in local development. … Read More →
Identifiers and Research: ORCID Basics and Plans – Interview with Laure Haak
Brazil is promoting a remarkable advance in the adoption of the research identifier ORCID with the formation of the Brazilian ORCID Consortium led by CAPES with the participation of several organizations, among which SciELO. All SciELO Brazil journals will publish articles with authors’ ORCID as of 2019. An interview with Laure Haak highlights the importance of ORCID. … Read More →
Discussing indicators in research funding: What role do altmetrics play? [Originally published in Europe of Knowledge blog in December/2017]
At any rate, altmetrics, or alternative metrics, are gaining momentum in higher education. This post is based on my master’s thesis that explores the usage of altmetrics with a focus on research funding. Altmetrics track down and count the mentions of scholarly outputs in social media, news sites, policy papers, and social bookmarking sites. Then altmetrics data providers aggregate the number of mentions. This allows an observation of how many times research has been viewed, discussed, followed, shared, and downloaded. … Read More →
The Qualis system: a perspective from a multidisciplinary journal [Originally published as the editorial in Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências vol. 89 no. 3]
The CAPES journal evaluation system Qualis penalizes the progress of multidisciplinary journals such as the Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências (AABC). Present in 39 of the 40 assessment areas, the Anais’ ranking varies from strata A2 to B5. When Qualis lowers its ranking in a given discipline, there is an immediate decrease in papers submission, affecting the journal’s evolution and its editorial management in the medium and long term. An editorial written by AABC Editor-in-Chief claims affirmative actions to qualify Brazil’s research with a quality multidisciplinary journal. … Read More →
Grant applications submitted to the NIH can cite preprints
The use of preprints as a means of accelerating research communication has become a frequent practice in many areas of knowledge also as a way to improve peer review. The U.S. National Institutes of Health, a renowned research and development agency, recently announced that grant applications and reports are entitled to cite preprints, “to speed the dissemination and enhance the rigor of their work”. … Read More →
Editors of Brazilian journals – a hard life that is getting harder! [Originally published as the editorial in Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências vol. 89 no. 1]
The financing of journals of Brazil can be improved by extending the validity period of research grants, in order to allow publishers a better plan for articles publication. An editorial written by Alexander Kellner in the first issue of 2017 of Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências examines the challenge faced by editors of journals of Brazil and highlights their hard work in attracting relevant manuscripts, seeking to achieve ever greater levels of excellence and internationalization. … Read More →
Five things to consider when designing a policy to measure research impact [Originally published in The Conversation]
The move of the Australian government to measure the impact of university research on society introduces many new challenges that were not previously relevant when evaluation focused solely on academic merit. … 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 →
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