Peer review is a constituent part of scholarly communication. It has many modalities: simple blind, double blind, open, and now, also partial reviews. Partial reviews, which only validates the technical soundness of a document, is a feature of open access mega-journals such as PLoS ONE and several others. … Read More →
Communication and peer review should be universally separated
The SciELO 20 Years Week will promote an ample and open forum on the future of scientific communication and journals. There is a discussion group for each topic of the SciELO 20 Years Conference. The discussion starts with this comment by Jan Velterop on the separation between communication and peer review posted in the discussion group of the Panel 3.1 that deals with fast communication via preprints and other means to accelerate the availability of research results. … Read More →
Fiocruz facing the challenge of Open Science for Development and Public Health
The large mobilization of the countries around Open Science is expressed by the development of infrastructures, Data Management Plans, training, and evaluation and reward metrics. As a new paradigm, Open Science must focus on the interests and benefits to society, as well as advances in knowledge. In the health area, opening research data can promote a more agile science focused on solving problems, formulating evidence-based public policies, and citizen participation as knowledge producer. … 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 →
Open peer review perspectives: a thought-provoking question mark
Research analyzes the feasibility of adopting Open Peer Review by Information Science journals. This post presents the first step already completed focusing on the editors. The second stage, already underway, is focused on referees in order to reach a comprehensive view on the adoption of Open Peer Review by Information Science journals. … 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 →
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 →
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