The nature and extent of predatory publishing is highly contested. Whilst debates have often focused defining journals and publishers as either predatory or not predatory. Kyle Siler argues that predatory publishing encompasses a spectrum of activities and that by understanding this ambiguity, we can better understand and make value judgements over where legitimacy lies in scholarly communication.
The SciELO Program has updated the document “Criteria, policy and procedures for the admission and permanence of journals in the SciELO Brazil Collection” [in Portuguese] with a new version that takes effect from May 2020. The document is referred to as SciELO Brazil Criteria for its purpose and function of contributing to the development of Brazil’s journals, and at the same time, it serves as a reference for the indexing criteria of all SciELO Network collections.
This article describes an international community-based effort to create metadata guiding principles for adopting and using richer metadata and advancing its application in scholarly communications. These principles can facilitate the dissemination, discoverability and use/reuse of many types of research and scholarly outputs. While much work remains to be done, these principles serve as a starting point for the evolution of processes that span the entire scholarly communication community.
Jon Tennant writes both Web of Science and Scopus are critical components of our research ecosystem, providing the basis for university and global rankings, as well as for bibliometric research. However, both are structurally biased against research produced in non-western countries, non-English language research, and research from the arts, humanities and social sciences. This viewpoint emphasises the damage that these systematic inequities pose upon our global knowledge production systems, and the need to research funders to unite to form a more globally-representative, non-profit, community-controlled infrastructure for our global research knowledge pool.
This article provides an overview of the ways in which the members of the Association of University Presses are working towards more inclusive practices in scholarly publishing. The authors document how bias has shaped universities and university presses, and propose actions to encourage inclusion and equity.
The SciELO Program has launched the SciELO Preprints server – http://preprints.scielo.org – with the aim of accelerating the availability of research articles and other scientific communications before, or in parallel with, their evaluation and validation by scientific journals through the peer review process. Although open to all thematic areas, SciELO Preprints will focus on immediately serving communications related to COVID-19.
Further to our announcement in October, the Steering Committee of Think. Check. Submit. is delighted to announce a new addition to its resources: a checklist for authors wishing to verify the reliability and trustworthiness of a book or monograph publisher. Drawing on existing expertise from experiences of their newest partner, OAPEN, the checklist for books offers sound advice along the lines of the recommendations already offered by the journal checklist.
The rest of the Think. Check. Submit. website has also been updated to make it more relevant for both books and journals.
Following on from the recent webinar entitled What is Scholarly Communication and Publishing in the 21st Century, OASPA asked their speakers to summarise their talks by offering a few key takeaways. This may be useful for those who missed it or wish to share with colleagues. You can also access the full audio recording and slides.
AmeliCA, a multi-institutional community-driven initiative supported by UNESCO and led by Redalyc and CLACSO, seeks a cooperative, sustainable, protected and non-commercial solution for Open Knowledge. AmeliCA is taking the 16-year experience and technological resources from Redalyc to strengthen non-profit publishing beyond the region. It is strategic for the research community and libraries to join forces, as well as share and connect individual efforts to build a cooperative infrastructure, in order to guarantee that publishing is led by the scholarly community and that its openness is sustainable.
