Tag: Scholarly Communication

Series of interviews with the President and ex-presidents of the ABEC: Interview with Lewis Joel Greene

The Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos (ABEC) and SciELO have key roles in promoting policies aimed at the advancement of Brazilian science regarding production, dissemination and internationalization, as well as always bringing to discussion topics such as ethics and best practices, aiming to foster the entire Brazilian publishing ecosystem, i.e., from the researcher/author through service providers, until its publication. This interview, with Lewis Joel Greene, who served as president of ABEC from 1996 to 1999 is the second in the series of interviews with the President and ex-presidents of the ABEC.
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Series of interviews with the President and ex-presidents of the ABEC: Interview with Rui Seabra Ferreira Jr.

The Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos (ABEC) and SciELO have key roles in promoting policies aimed at the advancement of Brazilian science regarding production, dissemination and internationalization, as well as always bringing to discussion topics such as ethics and best practices, aiming to foster the entire Brazilian publishing ecosystem, i.e., from the researcher/author through service providers, until its publication. Read More →

The power relations in world science. An anti-ranking to know the science produced in the periphery

The concept of mainstream science was consolidated globally because publications became the main axis of institutional and individual evaluation also in the periphery. The use of bibliometrics contributed to reinforce the extension of a progressively homogenous style of publication and the International Rankings of universities favored the extension of a heteronomous evaluative culture. However, the styles of production and circulation of the so-called science in the periphery are very diverse. Read More →

Competitiveness and Open Access of journals in a non-English speaking country

J-STAGE is a journal platform on which Japanese academic societies can publish their journals. Although more than 80% of them are freely accessible, most of them do not claim to be open access. Some barriers to open access publishing are described based on our experience obtained through conversations with the societies. Read More →

The Local and the Global: Puncturing the myth of the “international” journal

What are journals for? In one view they are a brand, a masthead that stands as a widely recognized proxy for some notion of quality assurance or interest. An alternate view is that they are communities, even “clubs” as we have explored in one article. The first of these views privileges the concept of “international” journals and an assumption that general interest implies better work. The second focuses attention on local needs and interests. Here the question is different, how well does a specific journal serve a specific community. 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 →

All journals should have a policy defining authorship – here’s what to include [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in January/2018]

Scientific research papers with large numbers of authors have become more commonplace, increasing the likelihood of authorship disputes. Danielle Padula, Theresa Somerville and Ben Mudrak emphasise the importance of journals clearly defining and communicating authorship criteria to researchers. As well as having a policy for inclusion, journals should also indicate unethical authorship practices, clarify the order of authors at an early stage, consider recognising “contributorship”, and refer any disputes that do arise to the authors’ institutions. Read More →

The basics of sponsorship at Crossref

There are many journals that want to register content and benefit from the services provided by Crossref, but may not be able to do so alone. These organizations use sponsors. Sponsors are organizations who publish on behalf of groups of smaller organizations. Nearly 650 of the 800 Brazil members of Crossref are represented by such a sponsor. Read More →

What do Spanish researchers think about Open Peer Review?

In February 2018, the Spanish Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas launched a survey to know the habits, preferences and opinions of its researchers when performing an evaluation and being subjected to open peer review, with the aim of contributing to the international debate on science assessment and possible ways of improvement. Fifty-four percent of respondents are satisfied with the dominant peer review system and fifty percent agree to open the reviewers’ identity as it helps reduce conflicts of interest. Read More →

Output and impact of Brazilian research: confronting international and national contexts

Brazilian scientific research, seen through its articles and their impact reveals a scenario that 30 years ago could not have been described. SciELO concretizes what Garfield envisioned for Latin America in the 1990s, allowing to delineate the citation flow, as in many countries, as yet unseen, and allowing to question the pertinence of Gibbs’s expression: “lost science in the third world”. Read More →

The basics of content types: Preprints, Crossmark, translations, and more

What’s the difference between preprints and ahead of print? When should you use each; and, what are the DOI requirements? This article answers those questions and provides a basic overview of how to connect the metadata records of related content types, like translations. Read More →

Do the article and scientific journals have a future?

How to think the future of scholarly communication, aiming at its broadest circulation, use, citation, and impact? It is proposed to preferentially focus on meeting the needs of the “Great Dialogue” in knowledge production and less on the financing and survival strategies of canonical forms of scholarly communication before the disruptive effects of open access. Read More →

Conclusions of the international conference on Open Scholarly Communication hosted by EKT [Originally published on the EKT website in July/2018]

The conference, organised by National Documentation Centre (EKT) in co-operation with the OPERAS network, targeted organisations promoting Open Scholarly Communication and Open Science, with the focus on the Social Sciences and Humanities Read More →

Towards universal open access? Why we need bibliodiversity rather than a “silver bullet”

The current debate on open access is often based on undue generalizations advocating for “silver bullet” models to flip the scholarly communication system globally. This approach is flawed because it doesn’t take into account the diversity of communication practices across the different disciplines and countries. Read More →

Book Review: Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age by Matthew J. Salganik [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in July/2018]

In Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age, Matthew J. Salganik explores the process of undertaking social research in the digital era, examining a wide range of concepts while also offering teaching activities and materials. In bringing together the expertise of social and data scientists to the benefit of both, this is a comprehensive overview of new approaches to social research in our time, recommends Marziyeh Ebrahimi. Read More →