Category Archives: oa.south_america

WORKSHOP ON VIEWPOINTS AND PERSPECTIVES FROM ACROSS THE AMERICAS IN THE CONTEXT OF OPEN ACCESS

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“As open access publishing grows, many are concerned that as equity of access to read and use research increases, equity in publishing may decrease and that many actors in the research publishing ecosystem may become more disenfranchised than before. Many recent initiatives and statements by organizations such as OA2020,  cOAlition S, UNESCO, Science Europe, the US Office of Science and Technology, and the International Science Council (ISC) have highlighted inequity as a challenge in the open access publishing landscape. The causes of this inequity are not just financial but also structural and cultural.

OA2020 is convening an online workshop, in collaboration with Coordenação De Aperfeiçoamento De Pessoal De Nível Superior (CAPES), Consorcio Colombia, Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), California Digital Library (CDL), Iowa State University, UNESCO, the ISC, cOAlition S, Science Europe, and additional partners, to bring together a wide range of participants from across North, Central, and South America to discuss the challenges to equitable open access in 2023 in this region and to explore potential solutions. 

Part of a series of regional workshops, this workshop is an opportunity for those who produce and fund research, including scientists and scholars, research administrators, libraries and library consortia, university leadership, science councils and grant funders, and ministries and agencies of research and education, to better understand the current tensions in the scholarly communication landscape and seek actionable plans and practical mechanisms that ensure equitable opportunity to openly disseminate the results of research. This workshop will expand and build on insights gathered in previous workshops that focused on viewpoints from Africa and Europe and from Australasia and Asia Pacific (insights are forthcoming)….”

#ODD2023 Stories @ Chile ?? – Open Knowledge Foundation blog

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“Abriendo Datos Foundation and Flacso Chile have worked for three years in the development of “Verano de Datos Abiertos” (Open Data Summer), an initiative that promotes the debate about the open data ecosystem and also contributes to a culture of learning in the context of Chile. To celebrate Open Data Day, Fundación Abriendo Datos hosted 8 telematics panels and one final face-to-face panel on 7 March 2023 at the Moneda Bicentenario Building, located in Sqantiago, Chile….”

Which Nationals Use Sci-Hub Mostly?: The Serials Librarian: Vol 0, No 0

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Abstract:  In the last decade, Sci-Hub has become prevalent among academic information users across the world. Providing thousands of users with millions of uncopyrighted electronic academic resources, this information pirate website has become a significant threat to copyrights in cyberspace. Information scholars have examined the unequal distribution of IP addresses of Sci-Hub users’ nationality and emphasized the high proportion taken by users from the developed countries. This study finds new evidence from Google Scholar. Searching “Sci-Hub.tw” in the academic search engine, the author finds 531 results containing the keyword. Considering the result, the author argues that academic users in South American countries may use Sci-Hub more frequently than their counterparts in the rest of the world. Moreover, users in the Global North also rely on Sci-Hub to complete their research as well. The new evidence on Google Scholar proves the universal use of Sci-Hub across the world.

 

Sociolinguistic repositories as asset: challenges and difficulties in Brazil | Emerald Insight

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Abstract:  Purpose

This paper aims to provide a context for Brazilian Portuguese language documentation and its data collection to establish linguistic repositories from a sociolinguistic overview.

Design/methodology/approach

The main sociolinguistic projects that have generated collections of Brazilian Portuguese language data are presented.

Findings

The comparison with another situation of repositories (seed vaults) and with the accounting concept of assets is evocated to map the challenges to be overcome in proposing a standardized and professional language repository to host the collections of linguistic data arising from the reported projects and others, in the accordance with the principles of the open science movement.

Originality/value

Thinking about the sustainability of projects to build linguistic documentation repositories, partnerships with the information technology area, or even with private companies, could minimize problems of obsolescence and safeguarding of data, by promoting the circulation and automation of analysis through natural language processing algorithms. These planning actions may help to promote the longevity of the linguistic documentation repositories of Brazilian sociolinguistic research.

Breve cronologia da Ciência Aberta no Brasil – Vida acadêmica – modo de usar

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From Google’s English:  “This brief chronology will map the history of discussions and initiatives on Open Science in Brazil (and some highly relevant international initiatives that put pressure on Brazilian actors, such as the UNESCO resolution). Until 2020 it includes academic works (such as articles, editorials and theses and dissertations – especially those related to the so-called Applied Human and Social Sciences), but even in these cases it will not contain all the production on the subject in the period . Thus, this survey is not intended to be a definitive ‘guide’ on the subject, but to present a glimpse into how the movement has unfolded, with special emphasis on the impacts on the publishing system and on doing science….”

FAPESP reformulates its policy of open access to publications | AGÊNCIA FAPESP

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“FAPESP [Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo] has reformulated its open-access policy, implemented in 2008, according to which scientific papers originating in research projects funded by it and approved for publication must be deposited in institutional repositories. Ordinance no. 37, issued on October 27 by FAPESP’s Executive Board (CTA), now mandates open access within 12 months of publication.

With the establishment of a deadline, it will be possible to verify compliance with FAPESP’s open-access mandate on the part of researchers it supports, using such tools as Google Scholar, which tracks whether research papers covered by funders’ public-access mandates are free to read. FAPESP expects this measure to enhance the visibility of the research it funds, and to increase the scientific, economic and social impact of published papers.

Researchers who are unable to comply for legal or contractual reasons must advise FAPESP of this impediment and justify it in the scientific reports required for the grants or scholarships associated with the publications, or via the contact section Converse com a FAPESP.”

SciELO – Brazil – Desafios para a sustentabilidade dos periódicos científicos brasileiros e do Programa SciELO Desafios para a sustentabilidade dos periódicos científicos brasileiros e do Programa SciELO

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Association between productivity and journal impact across disciplines and career age

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Abstract:  The association between productivity and impact of scientific production is a long-standing debate in science that remains controversial and poorly understood. Here we present a large-scale analysis of the association between yearly publication numbers and average journal-impact metrics for the Brazilian scientific elite. We find this association to be discipline-specific, career-age dependent, and similar among researchers with outlier and non-outlier performance. Outlier researchers either outperform in productivity or journal prestige, but they rarely do so in both categories. Non-outliers also follow this trend and display negative correlations between productivity and journal prestige but with discipline-dependent intensity. Our research indicates that academics are averse to simultaneous changes in their productivity and journal-prestige levels over consecutive career years. We also find that career patterns concerning productivity and journal prestige are discipline-specific, having in common a raise of productivity with career age for most disciplines and a higher chance of outperforming in journal impact during early career stages.

 

a luxury market? – basic research – KSU | The Sentinel Newspaper

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“The rapid migration of scientific online journals around the turn of the century seemed to usher in changes: In 1995, Forbes predicted that Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher, would be the “first victim of the Internet”. After 25 years, the tech-scientific arm of the RELX group, a multinational conglomerate that the publisher has become, has annual sales of more than £ 2.6 billion with profit margins of between 30% and 40%. …

Who in their right mind would spend dozens more times to have their item in nature?

The answer? Almost every. Not because scientists are not very eager to deal with their budgets, but on the contrary: Articles in renowned magazines are the engine that guarantees reputation, jobs and research resources in the academic world. Like those who pay for a Louis Vuitton bag, the writers care less about the product than about the brand.

The result is a prestigious economy that allows big magazines to demand what they want, and also gets freelance work from academics who want to bond with their brands as reviewers or editors. There is no room for renewal in this market: even competitors offering better services at lower cost would take decades to build a reputation for a nature or a science.

As a result, researchers from countries like Brazil are forced to choose between two ethically questionable alternatives: have their work blocked by paywalls for the benefit of others, or waste the country’s scarce research resources with excessive open access fees….

Ironically, Brazil has also launched Scielo, perhaps the world’s most successful large-scale Open Access initiative, which uses publicly funded infrastructure to ensure that most national journals do not charge access or publication fees. However, a large segment of Brazilian researchers cannot afford to use it as they have to lower their college degrees by not using large magazines….”

Towards open science: what we know and what we need to know

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“Open science presents itself as a set of policies and actions to disseminate research results in an accessible, free and reusable and reproducible way through public digital repositories. As a movement, it uses three basic elements: open access to publications; data opening (whether raw, models, specifications, or documentation); computational process opening (software and algorithms)(1).

Although it is not a new phenomenon, the term can still cause strangeness even to experienced researchers. Open access to articles, as the first element, encountered (and still finds) great resistance to becoming unanimous, although pressure from the scientific society and funding agencies has accelerated the progress of this stage. On the other hand, data opening seems to have been better received, at least in its interface related to the deposit of scientific manuscripts in the preprint format, however this is only the beginning.

Concerning the Brazilian experience, SciELO and the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (IBICT – Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia) have been leading the opening process and for some time have designed guidelines and strategies to guide their journals towards open science: TOP (Transparency and Openness Promotion)(2). This system interestingly presents levels of openness experimentation that range from pointing out what is a certain item to making it conditional on it being expressly fulfilled for the manuscript to be published.

Although it has existed since 2017, it was only in 2020 that the alignment of Brazilian journals to TOP was indeed accelerated, and significant changes will be adopted in the journals in the coming months and years to adapt to such principles.

Having this information and basing ourselves on the fact that historically changes have been the target of resistance, especially when they happen in an ancient system, like the scientific publication system, we use our privilege to take on multiple roles (author, reviewer, and editor) among the scientific publication process in Brazilian journals to reflect and point out in this editorial four central issues related to editorial management that should be recurrent among the actors involved in the publication process in the coming years months: …”

Scriptorium: Creating an Open-Access Creative Writing Journal in Brazil

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“The university press (EDIPUCRS) holds an open access-only policy when it comes to journal publishing, so every PUCRS journal is available without cost.5 Authors are not charged—publishing costs are covered by the university—and the editorial team is comprised by faculty members, helped by graduate and undergraduate students. In 2018, according to a report by Science-Metrix, Brazil had 75% of scholarly articles freely available. More recent data from Nature (2019) shows that, while the country remains one of the world leaders in open access, Brazil is now in fourth place, following Indonesia, Colombia, and Bangladesh.6

This kind of output of open access journals in Brazil can be explained by the fact that a large portion of research in Brazil is funded by public money. As such, one of the demands from funding agencies is that the results need to be shared in open access publications, leading more researchers to submit their work to OA journals. In addition, OA periodicals receive a higher evaluation from the Ministry of Education—which translates to more funding to the universities that publish them….”

Brazilian Publication Profiles: Where and How Brazilian authors publish

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Abstract:  Publishing profiles can help institutions and financing agencies understand the different needs of knowledge areas and regions for development within a country. Incites ® (Web of Science) was used to see where Brazilian authors were publishing, the impact, and the cost of this publishing. The USA was the country of choice for publishing journals, along with Brazil, England, and the Netherlands. While Brazilian authors continue to publish in hybrid journals, they are more often opting for closed access, with 89% of the papers published in Brazil being open access, compared with 21% of papers published abroad. The correlation between the cost of publishing and the number of citations was positive and significant. Publishing patterns were different depending on the area of knowledge and the Brazilian region. Stagnation or reduction in publications with international collaboration, industry collaboration, or in high impact open access journals may be the cause of a reduction in citation impact. These data can help in elaborating public and institutional policies for financing publications in Brazil, especially when looking at unfavourable changes in currency exchange rates.

 

Who Benefits from the Public Good? How OER Is Contributing to the Private Appropriation of the Educational Commons | SpringerLink

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Abstract:  The idea of Open Educational Resources (OER) has a history and is embedded in social contexts that influence its practice. To get a handle on tensions between different conceptualizations of “open” we discuss some of the battles surrounding the usage of the term. We note the origin of the concept of OER and how the emergence of the OER movement fits into the discourse of educational improvements through technologies and techniques. We argue that there is a relation between an uncritical stance toward technology and the appropriation of education activities by private oligopolies, a phenomenon that could be mitigated by a larger awareness of recent history and current sociotechnical analysis. We point out how these dilemmas play out in the Brazilian context of the implementation of OER in public policies and conclude by mentioning some programs and projects that point to the way forward.

 

Revisiting 2019, setting goals for 2020, and reflecting upon open science

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“The major objectives of the Jornal Brasileiro de Pneumologia (JBP, Brazilian Journal of Pulmonology) are to disseminate Brazilian research in the field of respiratory diseases and related areas, to expand the internationalization of the journal, and to act as one of the major sources of updates for the members of the Sociedade Brasileira de Pneumologia e Tisiologia (Brazilian Thoracic Society), increasingly reaching out to our readers. The JBP will celebrate its 45th anniversary in 2020. Since its inception, it has matured in the dissemination of knowledge by monitoring the developments and occasional events occurring in the field of pulmonology, continuing to be the leading Latin American journal in the field. The secondary and indirect objectives that should be highlighted are to increase the interest of recent graduates in the field and to promote the development of new researchers in related areas….

In Plan S,5 organized by an international coalition, as well as in presentations in various forums and publications by the SciELO Program, it has been suggested that open practices of scientific communication be adopted over the next five years. This scientific model includes open and unrestricted access to all peer-reviewed publications, acceptance of manuscripts previously deposited on a preprint server, adoption of the continuous publication modality, making all research content available in detail, and the possibility of open peer review.5-8 However, although most of the proposals put forth have been in agreement regarding open communication, which will certainly contribute to the progress of science, establish greater transparency in editorial processes, and democratize access to information, there are still certain questions about the universal adoption of this policy, even within the international scientific community, especially regarding the possibility of opening the peer review process (i.e., disclosing the identity of the reviewers to the authors). Certainly, there are advantages to an open peer review process, because it will increase the importance of the reviewers and promote a trend toward improvement of the quality of the evaluations, because all of the participants are likely to be more careful in carrying out their part in the process and to venture out of their comfort zone. However, there are potential negative aspects of this process, including a higher risk that reviewers will decline to participate in the peer review process (given that it has already been difficult to find reviewers in the various areas of knowledge using the traditional model) and a potential risk of “retaliation” by authors in the event of negative reviews regarding the manuscript in question….”

News & Views: Shifting Power Balances in Global Scholarly Output – Delta Think

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“The following figure analyzes the spread of output across major regions, comparing papers published in all journals with those published in fully OA journals….

 

Authors from Asia-Pacific (APAC) account for just under 45% of papers, with Europe a close second and the Americas third. (Total papers in this model amount to just under 2.4 million.)
However, Europe leads in authorship in fully OA journals, covering 52% of output compared with APAC’s 43%. (The model covers just over 500,000 papers in fully OA journals.)…
The top chart shows publications in all journals. Each color represents a different year. We can see that APAC’s share of output is growing, while Western Europe is flatlining and North America lessening.
Share of output in fully OA journals (the bottom chart) shows a slightly different picture. APAC is growing, but in this case, Western Europe’s share is declining, and North America’s share is shrinking even faster.
Smaller economies are growing their share of fully OA faster than they are growing their share of overall output, albeit from lower bases….

By measuring share of output and including overlap between multi-author papers, we can analyze how the “influence” of authors from different regions is changing. As shown above, data confirms the increase in APAC output and the static or decreasing trends in Western Europe and North America, respectively.

The story is much more nuanced when you drill into each country’s contributions. For example, China accounts for a bit less than half (48%) of the APAC region’s influence. While countries such as South Korea, Japan, India, and Australia account for single-digit percentages each, together they are moving the needle, accounting for almost 38% of APAC’s total output….”