2014 will be a decisive year for the development of the SciELO blog space. The priorities will be to strengthen the general blog on contemporary issues in scholarly communication, broaden the participation of the journals in the Humanities, and launch new thematic blogs. [Read more]
The amount and variety of digital information continues to grow, and this includes academic journals, government records, information for education, and all that is produced and published on the Internet which needs to be preserved. The need for long-term preservation is not an issue of technology, but rather an enormous unplanned challenge for institutions which requires professional skills not commonly found in the professional labor market. This challenge is one of the most pronounced issues in developing countries which are devoting large sums of money to deal with it. [Read more]
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]
Most biomedical journals from developing countries have a special characteristic, which consists in the fact that they can be grouped under the heading “Small Journalsâ€. 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]
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]
