A Key Element for the Healthy Globalization of Science

Scielo at 15: new challenges

● After WWII: Garfield and Maxwell changed everything

– Garfield, with his notion of “core journals” helped create a two-tier system of scientific communication;

– Garfield, with his “core journals”also helped engineer an inelastic market of scholarly journals;

– Maxwell, with Pergamon Press (1951) sought to create commercial journals with high profits;

➢ Maxwell tried to wrestle the control of the Science Citation Index (SCI) away from Garfield;

➢ Maxwell succeeded in creating a high-profit press for scientific journals: this completely changed the business scene of scientific publishing.


● From the SCI emerged new metrics, particularly the “Impact Factor” (IF)➢ IF's apply only to journals➢ IF's vary with fields of knowledge➢ IF's cannot justify three decimals (or any

decimal for that matter)➢ IF's do not refer to quality, but to visibility

within certain circles


● IF's were created to engineer a competition system, a ranking system of selected forms of visibility, not an evaluation of quality

● Without any justification, the use of IF's was extended to the evaluations of researchers:

➢ They have been judged according to where they published, rather than what they published

➢ Incentives, including money, have been used to incite researchers to publish in high-IF journals: THIS IS STUPID as we shall see!


● How do journals select articles?

➢ Quality obviously plays a role➢ Choice of problem is important➢ Prestige of authors' institution is important➢ Personal prestige of authors is important


● Science is universal at the level of observations, experiments, concepts and theories;

● Science is not universal when it comes to choice of problems;

➢ How else can we explain neglected diseases (e.g. malaria with over 600,000 deaths – mainly children – every year)?

➢ How else can we explain “lost science” - i.e. good research results neglected in the “core” literature?

● Let us also remember that research funding agencies, in rich countries, prioritize research areas according to their needs.


● The choice of problems in a country or a region amounts to a de facto SCIENCE POLICY;

● Responding to the incitations of high-IF journals amounts to fitting oneself in someone else's science policy;

● Trying to work with impact factor amounts to fitting local journals within someone else's science policy;

● Competing within an IF framework benefits only those that organize the framework, and the winners at the very top;

● Competing within an IF framework sets a particular journal that meets with some success as a target for take-over from multi-national publishers.


● Refusing to compete on the basis of IF is sometimes portrayed as leading to:

➢ Isolation from “international” science;➢ Mediocrity

This is false!


● Visibility should come from the whole world, and not through the lenses of rich countries only;

● Capacity development in science does not amount to producing a few “OECD-style” champions and neglecting the rest;

● Too much competition in science – often called “excellence”- can actually diminish the overall quality of the whole system;

● Scientific capacity for development also means the ability to answer questions of relevance to the national or regional situation. This is particularly true of medicine and agriculture.


● How to proceed:

➢ By stressing quality rather than excellence;➢ By redefining the criteria of quality around articles, rather

than journals (that is where it really counts);➢ By refusing to enter into competitions whose rules are

entirely out of regional control (for example impact factors);➢ By fostering the visibility of regional science on a world

scale by means that are independent from the “mainstream” indexing and bibliographic platforms;


● By promoting these platforms on a South-South basis so as to create a mass of information that can no longer be ignored anywhere;

● By creating incentives to promote research on certain kinds of problems of relevance to the region (and those who might scream about the need for research freedom should remember that rich countries do this all the time);

● By creating metrics that are based on articles, not journals. SciELO and RedALyC can cooperate on this;

● By creating important and prestigious world prizes that are controlled by emerging and developing nations around themes relevant to them. The definition of scientific champions is not universal either;

● By practising internationalism on a worldwide basis, and not on the basis of rich countries. Words such as “international” or “mainstream” currently used too often refer to rich countries only.


● At 15, SciELO fulfills some of these objectives, but its strong focus on impact factors is self-defeating because:

➢ It already leads to multinational publishers peeling off journals from the collection;

➢ It steers Latin American journals into problem sets that correspond to the de facto science policy of the rich countries;

➢ It creates scientific champions in Latin America that are identical to the champions from the North and this encourages the brain drain;

➢ It does not directly address the needs of emerging and developing nations.


● This said, SciELO is THE MOST IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC PLATFORM in LATIN AMERICA and it is a tremendous

achievement in itself.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SCIELO, and congratulations to all those, Abel Packer in particular, for making it as good as it already is.

● But some further progress and re-orientations are needed to make it the most important scientific

platform OF Latin America

A Key Element for the Healthy Globalization of Science

Technology

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