At a time when discussions about ethics in experimentation and scientific publication are going beyond laboratories and academic environments, and are peaking the interest of society as a whole, another threat is emerging to the credibility of science. Irreproducibility of research results is affecting the different areas of knowledge and is of concern to all. The pressure on researchers for positive and high impact outcomes is bound up with the natural desire of scientists to make groundbreaking discoveries, even if the evidence points to the contrary. … Read More →
Editorial ethics: the detection of plagiarism by automated means
The growth in plagiarism in academic articles requires publishers to have effective plagiarism detection systems, known as PDS, since there are multiple ways that this dishonest practice can be concealed. The issue is of such importance that, since 2004, the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin has been maintaining a specialized site of PDS software evaluations. … Read More →
Publishing giants fight back – Elsevier goes author hunting
Last December Elsevier sent out thousands of e-mails to repositories of articles from scientific publications featuring open access articles that had been published in Elsevier journals, requesting that those articles be removed, by invoking the protection given to copyright holders granted by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This raised an alarm in the academic community because it could be the start of similar actions by other commercial publishers. Voices have been raised in defense of the rights of authors, but sooner or later the researchers must decide whether the traditional publishing model is the one that best suits their interests. … Read More →
Scientific Data: Nature Publishing Group moves the communication of scientific data forward with its new online open access publication
The description and communication of research data is an integral part of the opening up of science and one which eScience adheres to; it is one of the specific SciELO action lines. Amongst the many initiatives which are in progress, it is the announcement made by Nature Publishing Group concerning the launch of the publication entitled Scientific Data which stands out. This publication is geared towards communicating the descriptions of scientific data files. … Read More →
Ethical Editing – Ghostwriting is an unhealthy practice
In scholarly communication, contrary to politics and literature, it is considered unethical to write anonymously (as a ghostwriter) and to put the name of another person to what has been written. This can have legal consequences. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for pharmaceutical and medical equipment companies to use ghostwriters to publish articles that promote their products, often without them having been properly tested in independent clinical trials. Nevertheless, these articles are often published in journals that have international impact. … Read More →
“Small Journals”, indexes and ecancer: an opportunity for Latin America
Most biomedical journals from developing countries have a special characteristic, which consists in the fact that they can be grouped under the heading “Small Journals”. Some of these publications have significant historic value since they have been in circulation for more than fifty years, while others have been published more or less on a regular basis for over a century. The Open Access international journal “ecancer” is beginning to enrich this context, and is contributing to the regional and international dissemination of knowledge produced in the field of oncology in Latin America.” … Read More →
PubMed Commons: NLM launches pilot version of open comments on articles
The United States National Library of Medicine announced the implementation of the PubMed Commons, an innovative system that enables researchers to comment on published scientific papers, promoting a forum of discussion among peers. For the pilot phase, NIH and Wellcome Trust scientists were selected to test the initiative, along with invited colleagues. This system meets the worldwide trend to promote the open discussion of research results. … Read More →
Interview with Atila Iamarino
Social networks are gaining increasing importance in scientific communication. One of the classical tools of social media is scientific blogs. Relevant questions about the use of blogs in scientific communication are disclosed and discussed in this interview with Atila Iamarino, published in both audio and text. … Read More →
Ethical editing practices and the problem of self-plagiarism
If an author copies a passage from another author without indicating it, it is considered plagiarism, but … what happens if he takes passages from his own previously published works without indicating it? Self-plagiarism is not an offense against intellectual property but it is, however, a significant ethical lapse in scholarly communication. Is it Ok to reuse one’s own material? To what degree can a work incorporate parts of previous works? … Read More →
Interview with William Gunn
Mendeley, the service for managing and sharing scholarly articles, is an innovative tool that makes up the new modus operandi of scholarly communication based on networks of researchers. Mendeley was acquired by the commercial publisher Elsevier which guarantees, however, to keep it free to use. … Read More →
Controversial Article in The Journal “Science” exposes the weaknesses of Peer-Review in a set of Open Access Journals
Just before celebrating the Open Access Week worldwide, a controversial article published on Science exposed the recurrent question of the weaknesses of the peer review process in scientific communication. The paper focus on the selection of journals which collect article processing fees and describes how 304 versions of a fictitious article containing serious and obvious flaws were accepted in 157 open access journals, many already considered predatory. This post describes the experiment and gathers comments from international blogs. … Read More →
Impact – Nature’s Viewpoint: comments on special issue 502 (7471) 17th October, 2013
The journal Impact Factor as measured by citations is a relevant yet insufficient measure in the evaluation of projects by national research funding agencies. Without denying this objective measure and the importance it has, a consensus is emerging that the social and economic impact of research funded by these agencies must also be evaluated. … Read More →
Interview with Cameron Neylon
The Open Access advocate, Cameron Neylon, speaks about the role of PLoS journals on the dissemination of best quality articles, through a business model that transfers from readers to authors the responsibility for the payment of editorial costs. … Read More →
Interview with Mark Patterson
Mark Patterson, the keynote speaker of SciELO 15 Years Conference, describes how eLife is consolidating the idea that science communication is an integral part – one of the most important – of academic research through open access publication of outstanding content selected by a select group of researchers. The researcher will also talk about the recent controversial article on open access published by Science. Patterson attributes to SciELO the growing visibility and quality of Latin America journals. … Read More →
Interview – Rogério Meneghini
In this interview, Rogerio Meneghini reflects that the international visibility of journals from emerging economy countries depends not only on the field but also on journal evaluation which has to be understood as a mechanism which seeks to improve them. Technical writing courses in universities in the first year are important in this aspect and, going beyond papers and projects, the learning of how to write a patent is particularly important these days. … Read More →
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