Tag: Research Policy

Open access as a sustainable alternative to scholarly communication

The abusive price of scientific journals subscriptions, that triggered the open access movement in the 2000s, remains until today. The enormous financial pressure on academic libraries, research institutions and governments find alternative in open access business models. Innovative alternatives on open access publishing systems were created in several countries and a workshop organized by the European Commission brought together experts to discuss them. Get to know some alternatives. Read More →

European Commission debates alternative approaches to open access

The Workshop on Alternative Open Access Publishing Models organized by the European Commission in October 2015 convened experts to discuss the future of open access as preferable publication model of research results, especially those financed by public funds. The meeting’s approach prioritized issues beyond the mere access to publications and resulted in fairer and more transparent alternative models aimed at increasing the dissemination and use of research by academia and other sectors of society. 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 →

SciELO’s Contribution to the Globalization of Science [Originally published in Digital Science’s “Perspectives” blog]

SciELO was created in Brazil about two decades ago when international indexes limited their coverage to the so called main stream journals ignoring an universe of journals edited by regional publishers mainly from developing and non-English speaking countries. Aiming to increase the quality and visibility of world-class research communicated by these nationally edited peer reviewed journals, SciELO quickly emerged as an indexing and publishing model adopted by a network of 15 countries that covers over one thousand journals, more than 500 thousand articles that serve a daily average of more than 1 million downloads. SciELO contributes to the globalization of science and to the cultural enrichment of the international flow of scientific information. This post by the directors of SciELO was originally published on Digital Science’s blog, “Perspectives”. Read More →

Internationalization of journals was the central topic of the 4th Annual SciELO Meeting

The extent of national and international dimensions as determinants of the performance of journals of Brazil dominated the program of the 4th Annual SciELO Meeting, held on December 2, at the FAPESP auditorium in São Paulo. Currently responsible for the communication of more than 25% of the national scientific production indexed internationally, the journals of Brazil influence the country’s international scientometric ranking, positively in number of articles and negatively in received citations per article. Read More →

ABEC Brazil and SciELO request the reformulation of the announced plan by CAPES to publicly finance publication of journals of Brazil by a foreign publisher

ABEC Brazil (the Brazilian Association of Scientific Editors) and the SciELO/FAPESP program are publicly requesting that CAPES suspend and reformulate its plan announced this past October 29th in order to fund the publication of a group of journals of Brazil by a foreign commercial publisher. In its place, it is proposed that the resources announced by CAPES to be made available to cover publication charges (Article Processing Charges) of articles by authors affiliated with Brazilian institutions published in quality journals published within the country. Read More →

Exchange of research data remains low and increases slowly

The exchange of academic research data allows other scientists to replicate the experiments and move solidly in the construction of science. Although the major funding agencies in the world established in its policies the open availability of data, only a third of medical research, and much less in other areas comply with these provisions. There are several reasons that slow this progress, ranging from copyright and commercial interests to national security. Read More →

Study highlights academic journal publication models in Brazil and Spain

Brazil and Spain have a commanding profile in academic output in their respective regions, and possess great potential in the field of scholarly publishing. Notwithstanding the differences in the history of scientific development between the two countries, both have a similar number of journals in the Web of Science database and have developed successful open access models. This article highlights a study carried out by researchers from those two countries and gives an outline of these programs and the reasons behind their success. Read More →