On June 8, 2021, ABEC Brasil promoted, with the support of the SciELO Program, the webinar “Sex and gender equity in research and publication”. Taught by Dr. Shirin Heidari, founder of the European Association of Scientific Editors (EASE) Gender Policy Committee, lead author of the SAGER (Sex and Gender Equity in Research) guidelines and founding President of GENDRO, the webinar discussed, among other issues, why sex and gender matter in research and reporting, and what editors, reviewers and authors can do to improve gender-sensitive reporting. … Read More →
The role of review articles goes beyond synthesizing current knowledge about a research topic
Review articles, besides helping to keep researchers updated on specific topics, play an important role in the curation of academic works and can influence emerging research topics through citation patterns. … Read More →
The journal Educação em Revista is reviewing only preprints in the “publish, then review” model
The journal Educação em Revista advances its alignment with Open Science by adopting the “publish, then review” model of publishing by only accepting to evaluate manuscripts already moderated and made available in SciELO Preprints. In an interview to the blog SciELO in Perspective, the journal’s editors talked about the innovation. … Read More →
Accelerating Plan S: open access agreements with smaller publishers
Open Access (OA) agreements between consortia, libraries and smaller independent publishers are increasingly being used around the world, reflected by the growing number of published OA articles. A recent report from the Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), of which SciELO is a member, shows the progress being made in other regions of the world. On the other hand, Latin America, a pioneer in OA journals, does not suffer from these limitations, but for small publishers in many countries there is still a long way to go. … Read More →
What are preprints? [Originally published in DADOS’ blog in May/2021]
The traditional double-blind assessment model of scientific articles has been challenged in the last two decades by the so-called “preprint servers”. However, there are still many concerns in the Social Sciences about what preprints are and what changes they bring to the traditional framework of scientific assessment and publication. In this mini class, we seek to answer these questions from the experience of the journal DADOS. … Read More →
Early Reports and the new policy of the Web of Science Journal Impact Factor
Recently, Journal Citation Reports (JCR) incorporated early reports documents into indexing, therefore, the impact factors are being modified. This new methodology will have an effect of reordering journal rankings, with important implications in their academic evaluation. Questions and criticisms have arisen. … Read More →
It takes a global village or a recap of NISO Plus 2021
The second NISO Plus Conference was held virtually on February 22-25. This year’s theme was “Global conversations – global connections” with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), accessibility, and the changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic being transversal topics throughout the conference. This post recaps (mainly) the discussions around these topics and how they relate to our community’s current challenges. … Read More →
Grim perspectives for Brazilian periodicals [Originally published as the editorial in Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências vol. 93 no. 1]
Covid-19 had devastating effects that go beyond economics and also affected the periodicals published in Brazil. An editorial of the Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências has called attention that no journal published in the country will receive any support from the funding agencies in 2021 and calls for relevant stakeholders to discuss solutions to avoid the collapse of the publication system that is approaching if no measures are taken. … Read More →
Editors opine on editorial policy and aspects of peer review
Peer review varies widely between journals and disciplines. A study recently published in eLife aimed to assess the posture of journal editors from five disciplines on their way of conducting peer review. The results suggest that peer review remains largely a closed practice, with some challenges from an ethical point of view. … Read More →
Integration of national academic databases in Europe
The need for a comprehensive infrastructure for scholarly publications has been on the European Union’s agenda for a long time. In particular, the European Commission’s open science policy highlights the need for a good database for monitoring Open Access publications in Europe. However, many publications are still missing to rely on a comprehensive information infrastructure on open research. Over the past 10 years, European countries have invested significantly in national infrastructures, and now, at least 20 European countries have a national database for open publication research metadata. However, they are not yet integrated or widely used for cross-country comparisons. … Read More →
Scientific rigor and open science: ethical and methodological challenges in qualitative research
The literature demonstrates growing criticism of the reliability of qualitative research, including claims that it lacks rigor and methodological clarity. In the publication system, several actions reflect this increased attention to rigor. Initiatives by major research funding agencies also emphasize rigor. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), for example, has fostered efforts to promote strategies to increase rigor and transparency in the reporting of results of qualitative research. Here, we offer a brief panorama, permeated by transformations that include increasing initiatives to promote open science. We explore some questions about the current discussion of scientific rigor, not only in publications, but also in proposing qualitative research projects. … Read More →
Publishers and FAIR data
In this post a proposal is introduced for academic publishing outfits to encourage and enable authors to make their articles — and where possible the underlying datasets — semantically unambiguous so that they can be communicated as FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). The proposal is described in-depth in a published open access article, to which a link is provided in the post. … Read More →
Towards a more open Soil Science
Most of the data resulting from research conducted in Brazil is not yet available in open access repositories. Here, we urge soil scientists to adopt a more open stance towards research data in the area, aiming to increase science sustainability and foster scientific collaboration. … Read More →
‘The government is following the science’: Why is the translation of evidence into policy generating so much controversy? [Originally published in the LSE Impact blog in November/2020]
In the UK, the government has presented itself as guided by scientific evidence in its policy responses to COVID-19. This has led to science, in particular epidemiology, itself becoming politicised and contested. However, neither the politicisation of science nor questions surrounding the status of evidence are new. In this post, Luis Pérez-González, outlines how a similar politics of expertise has played out in environmental policy-making. The author argues that for scientific evidence to be successfully communicated in policy, it needs to be informed by bipartisan values. … Read More →
DOAJ to lead a collaboration to improve the preservation of open access journals [Originally published in ISSN.org in November/2020]
DOAJ, CLOCKSS Archive, Internet Archive, Keepers Registry/ISSN International Centre and Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have agreed to partner to provide an alternative pathway for the preservation of small-scale, APC-free, Open Access journals. … Read More →
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