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 →
“10 years of research impact : the most cited articles in Scopus 2001 – 2011” – Synthesis of the article originally published in the Elsevier newsletter “Research Trends, Issue 38”
Gali Halevi and Henk Moed investigate what the most frequently cited articles were in Scopus from 2001-2011, in eight main research areas, and give their authors the chance to comment on their achievements. … Read More →
Meeting considers how open access could address inequalities – Originally published in Research Information on October 19, 2014
Mark Patterson reports back from the COASP meeting that was held in Paris in September. The meeting presented a broad range of initiatives covering diverse geographical regions, subject areas and content types. The overarching sense was one of progress on a number of fronts, and the prospects for much greater change in the sphere of scholarly communication. … Read More →
Rise of the Rest: The Growing Impact of Non-Elite Journals – Originally published on Google Scholar Blog on October 8, 2014
The world of scholarly communication has changed quite a bit over the last decade. This post from Google Scholar team explore the impact of these changes – looking at how scholarship and citation patterns have changed as publications and archives moved online and comprehensive relevance-ranked search became available to everyone. … Read More →
The challenges of retraction: cleaning up the literature might be difficult
There is consensus that misconduct in academic publications should be remedied as soon as possible. However, there are a number of implications – ethical, moral, legal and those related to the reputation of the journals and researchers in the retraction process – that turn the process into a complex one which can often become unworkable. … Read More →
Publish or perish? The rise of the fractional author… – Originally published on the Elsevier newsletter “Research Trends Issue 38”
Andrew Plume and Daphne van Weijen investigate how the pressure researchers feel to publish their work has affected co-authorship patterns over the past 10 years. Are researchers publishing more unique articles or co-authoring more articles? … Read More →
Retraction of scientific works and pseudoscience
Is the growing number of scientific retractions necessarily due to the fruits of pseudoscience? Productive reflection on the subject leads us to the need to recognize the current demands of the scientific system for researchers, conflicts of interests at stake and that science is produced by fallible human beings with their own moral values . Globalization, while supporting misconduct, strengthens social control. Increased retraction of papers is a necessary response of the social control to what some authors refer to as “pseudoscience”. … Read More →
Ethical publishing – should plagiarized pieces be retracted ? – well, perhaps not all
An article that contains sections of texts copied from other sources (plagiarism) does not necessarily make its research bad or invalid. Even though this is a warning of unethical behavior, this does not always merit the rejection or retraction of the article concerned. This is the opinion published recently in an article in Nature. … Read More →
The SciELO journals are being improved by the adoption of classic workflows relating to the online management of article submissions
Together with the journals that it indexes, SciELO is fostering the improvement of the management of the evaluation of article submissions in order to help overcome the various difficulties faced by the journals, and to strengthen the transparency of the processes. Part of this initiative is the use of automated management systems that organize the functions of the parties involved in the evaluation of article submissions, allow for the monitoring of the workflows and provide statistics on the corresponding activities, with a view to steering the systematic improvement of the processes. This post analyzes three classic workflows in the automated management of article submissions adopted by a group of SciELO journals whose promising results show the viability of SciELO’s strategy. … Read More →
Author credits …. Credited for what?
When the publication of a scientific article has been the joint responsibility of dozens of people, the following questions can arise: Who is the author? How is credit apportioned? and Does everyone have the same level of responsibility? A recent editorial in Nature puts forward a taxonomy which can be used to categorize the different roles which come together to make up the concept of authorship. It is interesting to make a comparison with how the film industry addresses this issue when apportioning credits in the awarding of Oscars. … Read More →
The Open Data movement: international consolidation
The open data movement – the availability of scientific research data for preservation, searching, using and citing – is gaining followers in all sectors of the academic world, and with editors, publishers, research institutions and funding agencies. The movement will allow greater interoperability, transparency, visibility and research impact, in addition to ensuring the digital preservation of the original data that would otherwise have a tendency to be lost or become inaccessible with the passage of time. … Read More →
South America science in Nature
The celebrated journal Nature devotes a special section of its June 11 issue to an analysis of South American research output, highlighting areas of excellence and innovation which are internationally recognized, and fields of collaboration with other countries both inside and outside the region. The articles in this section stress the economic and infrastructural inequalities within the region, as well as the low levels of investment in research and development, and point to FAPESP as a successful model of investment directly linked to a state’s GDP. … Read More →
The challenges in professionalization
The professionalization of the management and operation of journals indexed by SciELO is facing challenges related to SciELO’s central position in the academic environment, with particular reference, on the one hand, to the rational use of the limited time that researchers dedicate to the position of Editor-in-Chief and, on the other hand, to the adoption of editing, publishing, dissemination and marketing services in line with the international state of the art. … Read More →
What is the decline of the elite journals?
According to a study by Vincent Larivière of the Université de Montréal, there was an exponential increase in the number of articles published in the elite journals. However, it is now required twice the number of citations than in previous decades for an article to be in the top 5% with higher impact, and that these articles are distributed amongst a wider base of titles because authors have more independence in choosing where they publish. … Read More →
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