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 →
SciELO launches new operation interface for its collections
The new operating interface of the national and thematic collections of the SciELO Network offers a contemporary visual experience and it is characterized by its fast response. The development of the interface used efficient, flexible and high security programming, processing and integration technologies. The new interface has been in experimental operation with the SciELO Public Health thematic collection since November 2017. In 2019 all SciELO Network collections will be operating with the new interface. The launch of the new interface is part of the 20 years celebration of the SciELO Program. … Read More →
How to make the most of an academic conference – a checklist for before, during and after the meeting [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in March/2018]
Preparing for the celebration of 20 years of SciELO, this post by Marta Teperek presents a checklist of the preparations before, during, and after an academic conference to maximize the opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals and exchange stimulating ideas. … Read More →
Authorship criteria preserve scholarly communication integrity
The increasing demand for transparency and openness in research and its communication aims to increase the reliability and reproducibility of published results. The attribution of authorship, due to its relevance in the academic processes of evaluation and reward, requires commitment, transparency and clearly defined rules. A group of researchers comprised of scholars, research institutions, funding agencies, publishers and scientific societies developed a taxonomy with 14 categories to classify authors’ contributions. Linking the categories of this taxonomy to the author’s persistent digital identifier (ORCID) and article metadata allows to track authors’ contributions through their publications and their careers. … Read More →
The articles of SciELO journals on the European Commission Open Science platforms
The SciELO technological platform was updated in early 2018 to allow the integration of SciELO journal articles into the information sources of the European Commission’s OpenAire and OpenMinTeD projects. OpenAire operates a repository of research texts and data and supports the European community’s open access mandates and open research data. The OpenMinTeD project promotes the development of a full-text mining platform and research data. The participation of SciELO articles in these platforms will contribute to increase the use and visibility of the research results they communicate. … Read More →
Scientific communication practices in High Energy Physics: potential of preprints
The use of preprints repositories in High Energy Physics (HEP) to accelerate scientific communication dates back more than half a century, encouraging the practice of self-archiving and open access to research results. This report reflects on the potential of preprints in HEP scientific communication through the open access initiatives SPIRES and arXiv. The success of preprints repositories and databases in physics seems to have encouraged other areas to create their own thematic repositories, favoring the free circulation of information and discussion of scientific data. … Read More →
Radiography of open access academic publishing and its bibliometric indicators
How does open access publishing evolves over time? Is it true that open access papers get more citations? Is open access increasing due to institutional or government mandates or at the initiative of authors themselves? To answer these and other questions, the US National Science Foundation commissioned Science-Metrix a detailed study on open access academic publishing, considering the gold route and the green route, the influence of the areas and the behavior of the research leading countries over the last decade. Here are the results. … 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 →
Quantity does matter as citation impact increases with productivity [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in January/2018]
Many scholars are encouraged to focus on the quality not the quantity of their publications, the rationale being that becoming too focused on productivity risks reducing the quality of one’s work. But is this, in fact, the case? Peter van den Besselaar and Ulf Sandström have studied a large sample of researchers and found that, while results vary by field, there is a positive and stronger than linear relationship between productivity and quality (in terms of the top cited papers). This same pattern appears to apply to institutions as well as individual researchers. … Read More →
Sant Joan d’Alacant Declaration in defense of Open Access to scientific publications, by the group of editors of Spanish journals on health sciences (GERECS)
Aligned with the European Open Science Policy Platform and other declarations, the group of editors of Spanish journals on health sciences, in its last November meeting, issued the Sant Joan d’Alacant declaration in defense of Open Access. … Read More →
SciELO Indexing Criteria align with open science communication
The new SciELO Brazil Criteria are aligned with the good practices of open science communication. They become valid from January 2018 and project a new stage of improvement of Brazil’s scientific communication, which should be progressively extended to the other countries of the SciELO Network. The advancement towards open science has as a characteristic the repositioning of the main players of scholarly communication: authors, journals, and research funders. … Read More →
Of Subscriptions and Article Processing Charges
Article Processing Charges (APCs) – although they face criticism – do have advantages over subscriptions. They make immediate open access possible, but they also allow other drawbacks of subscriptions to be avoided, such as fixed page budgets. What APCs have not been able to do, is lower the financial burden of science communication on the research community, as many open access advocates had wanted and expected. A solution may be found – even if only a partial one – in the provision of preprints as a matter of course. … Read More →
The (pre) history of biology preprints
Some terms used currently with certain familiarity give us the false impression of having been coined in the light of the latest technology and inextricably linked to the Internet. Preprints repository is one such example. It seems impossible to devise a way of storing preliminary versions of scientific papers in a non-virtual space, let alone sharing them with as many stakeholders as possible otherwise than electronically. For that is exactly what happened in the unlikely year of 1961, when the NIH began circulating printed biology preprints to a list of subscribers in an experiment called the Information Exchange Groups. … Read More →
Academic journals with a presence on Twitter are more widely disseminated and receive a higher number of citations [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in December/2017]
Previous research has shown that researchers’ active participation on Twitter can be a powerful way of promoting and disseminating academic outputs and improving the prospects of increased citations. But does the same hold true for the presence of academic journals on Twitter? José Luis Ortega examined the role of 350 scholarly journals, analysing how their articles were tweeted and cited. … Read More →
Towards open science, Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz welcome submission of preprint manuscripts
Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz is now accepting submission of manuscripts that are in preprint format. This decision follows the recent initiative by SciELO in launching a preprint service and it is aligned to the global movement of open science. This new modality of dissemination of scientific research results will break paradigms and certainly change the way science is measured today. It represents a small step for editors, but a huge leap in scientific communication for society. … Read More →
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