![\"\"](\"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/rpf-scielo2-2024-11-800.jpg\")
Julia Jabur<\/span>According to Packer, this consortium of agencies has been possible thanks to FAPESP mobilizing to provide national scope to the initiative and the federal government being open to the idea. He explains, \u201cLast year, CAPES began to adopt a policy for open access and open science and to formulate a wider strategy to deal with Brazilian scientific production appropriate to SciELO\u201d.<\/p>\nAn arm of the Ministry of Education, CAPES, is a federal government foundation responsible for funding scholarships and evaluating graduate programs in Brazil; the agency has long influenced the course of academic publications. Approximately two decades ago, CAPES adopted a scientific journal classification system known as Qualis-per<\/em>\u00edodicos<\/em>, which was used to assess output quality among students and teaching staff on Brazilian master\u2019s and PhD pathways and define the number of scholarships for the programs. There have been recent changes in the evaluation model for use of this ranking (see sidebar<\/em><\/a>), but retrospective analysis has shown that the CAPES classification discouraged graduate students and teaching staff from submitting manuscripts to most of the journals indexed on SciELO because few of them were well regarded on the Qualis scale. \u201cIt\u2019s important that more Brazilian journals become the first option for our researchers when publishing their work,\u201d says CNPq president, physicist Ricardo Galv\u00e3o.<\/p>\n In fact, only a small proportion of the journals in the collection have an impact comparable to that of internationally renowned titles in their areas. The impact of a journal is measured on the bibliometric indicators calculated by international platforms, which are based on the number of citations that its articles receive in other publications. One problem is that some Brazilian vehicles mostly divulge regional-level papers, which, while relevant, are rarely cited in noteworthy international journals on platforms, and there are authors who produce only incremental results, not attracting the interest of other researchers.<\/p>\n CAPES also deals with academic publications in another of its programs: the Portal de Peri<\/em>\u00f3<\/em>dicos<\/em> (Periodicals Portal), which allows researchers from public institutions and universities to access content from thousands of international journals. To pay subscriptions or remunerate publishing houses that franchise their publications, the agency invested R$546 million last year alone and has recently sought to close new types of deals with publishers to include expenses on subscriptions and article processing charges for open-access publication of articles by Brazilian researchers in a single account. This model, known as read and publish, is becoming more widespread, primarily in Europe. \u201cIn the future, when we have a solid base of Brazilian journals, we can reduce our dependence on overseas periodicals and gain bargaining power in negotiating deals with publishers,\u201d says Carvalho of CAPES.<\/p>\n The Brazilian SciELO library has become an internationally recognized open-access initiative\u2014its model has inspired collections carrying the same name in sixteen other countries, mostly Latin American, but also in Portugal, Spain, and South Africa. Spin-off initiatives in Brazil include SciELO Livros (Books), a platform with more than 2,000 academic works; SciELO Preprints, a repository for manuscripts not yet submitted for peer review; and SciELO Data, which stores research data related to journal articles.<\/p>\n Strictly speaking, the library was created a few years before the launch of the international open access movement, which, beginning in the 2000s, spread the idea that research outcomes obtained with public funding should be readily available on the internet for any interested person, without the need to pay subscriptions or fees. The scientific publication market has changed dramatically from what it was at the turn of the century. Currently, an open-access scientific paper can be provided in a number of different ways: in preprint repositories, for manuscripts awaiting peer review; on the author\u2019s personal page or in university archives, with authorization from the journal of publication; in not-for-profit periodicals; or in those not levying fees on authors, such as those maintained by scientific societies and featuring in the SciELO collection.<\/p>\n A growing number of journals published by commercial houses also disclose articles freely on the internet. To fund their operations without charging the readers, publications now require that authors pay sometimes hefty amounts in the form of article-processing charges (APCs). \u201cWe had thought that open access could make article publishing cheaper, but these days, it is more expensive than before,\u201d says Packer.<\/p>\n <\/a>Galv\u00e3o, of CNPq, observes that the pathway recently taken by the open access movement is enormously harmful to developing countries such as Brazil. \u201cYou have to pay US$3,000 to publish an article in a good international journal; in some cases, the cost can reach US$10,000. The outlay is very high and can make it impossible for us to publish in renowned journals,\u201d he says (see<\/em> Pesquisa FAPESP issue n\u00ba 327<\/em><\/a>). He continues, \u201cBrazilian journals need to be empowered more, and the best option for creating a robust system is the SciELO library, which has background and experience in the matter\u201d. Galv\u00e3o observes that CNPq has recently come under pressure to create a repository to store and share data from research conducted in Brazil\u2014a requirement of the open science concept\u2014but states that this requires significantly large investments. He concludes, \u201cThe way I see it, each university and institution should have their own repositories. This also highlights the importance of valuing the SciELO library, which has a structure for storing research data related to published articles\u201d.<\/p>\n The CAPES Qualis-peri<\/em>\u00f3<\/em>dicos<\/em> system for classifying scientific journals will no longer be used to appraise the output of graduate students and teaching staff in Brazil during the quadrennium 2025\u20132028, according to the institution\u2019s assessment director Antonio Gomes de Souza Filho. He explains, \u201cThis is a concept shift; evaluation now focuses on the quality and classification of the article, and not just the bibliometric performance of the scientific journal in which it was published\u201d. The proposal, which was approved in early October by the CAPES TechnicalScientific Higher Education Board, involves three new article classification procedures that may be combined depending on what the heads of each knowledge area define.<\/p>\n First, the bibliometric indicators of the journal in which the article is published, such as its citations, are taken into account. \u201cCertain principles of Qualis continue, but we will no longer have that list of journals,\u201d says the director. The second procedure involves combining article citation rates with their alternative indicators, or \u201caltimetrics,\u201d such as mentions on websites and social networks, and the number of downloads, in addition to qualitative criteria of the journal in which they are published, for example, valuing open-access journals of good quality or national relevance, per those indexed in the SciELO collection. There is no focus on metrics in the third procedure but rather on the qualitative evaluation of each article, observing, for example, its scientific contribution and theoretical impact.<\/p>\n \u201cWith this widening of procedures, the new methodology makes for a more accurate appraisal of different articles published in the same journal. Instead of attributing them with the same classification on the basis of the impact of the journal, the specific contributions that each one promotes can be identified. We see this as an important development,\u201d says Souza Filho. The methodology will be applied to the evaluation set to be completed in 2029. CAPES <\/div>\n Published in November 2024<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The SciELO library is now a national initiative, reasserting Brazil\u2019s commitment to open-access academic journals","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":535424,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"coauthors":[98],"class_list":["post-554401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554401"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":554409,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554401\/revisions\/554409"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/535424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554401"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=554401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nA system that ranks scientific journals will be replaced by classification with a direct focus on articles<\/em><\/p>\n
\nis expected to publish guidelines, with details of each procedure, in March 2025.<\/p>\nSarah Schmidt<\/h4>\n