COMMUNICATING AND EVALUATING SCIENCE Anabela Gradim and Catarina Moura (Org.) LABCOM.IFP COMUNICATION, PHILOSOPHY AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH UNIT UNIVERSITY OF BEIRA INTERIOR EN COMMUNICATING AND EVALUATING SCIENCE Anabela Gradim and Catarina Moura (Org.) LABCOM.IFP COMUNICATION, PHILOSOPHY AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH UNIT UNIVERSITY OF BEIRA INTERIOR Technical Title Specification Communicating and Evaluating Science Organization Anabela Gradim and Catarina Moura Collection LabCom Series Research in Communication Direction José Ricardo Carvalheiro Graphic Design Cristina Lopes Catarina Moura and Sara Constante (Cover) ISBN 978-989-654-238-2 (paper) 978-989-654-240-5 (pdf) 978-989-654-239-9 (epub) Legal Deposit 395070/15 Print Print-on-demand LabCom.IFP Books www.labcom-ifp.ubi.pt Beira Interior University Rua Marquês D’Ávila e Bolama. 6201-001 Covilhã. Portugal www.ubi.pt Publishing copyright authorizations from both articles and images are exclusively the author’s responsibility. Contents Introduction ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 1 Part I ACADEMIC INTEGRITY AND RESEARCH & EVALUATION INDICATORS Predatory Publishers are Destroying the Integrity of Scholarly Communication ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 11 Jeffrey Beall By Albert Einstein, the Editor, you, and me ���������������������������������������������������� 33 Allen W. Wilhite and Eric A. Fong Scientific Output in Humanities and Social Sciences: Problems and Alternatives ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 49 João Costa Portuguese universities on the rankings: strategies for improvement ������������� 59 Paula Pechincha, António Marques and José António Sarsfield Cabral The evaluation of the scientific production in biotechnology, law and arts: proposal of a model �������������������������������������� 89 Sofia Fernandes Part II OPEN ACCESS CHALLENGES FOR SCIENCE POLICY Predatory publishers and open access models ����������������������������������������������� 113 Anabela Gradim OpenAIRE and the communication of science: the Open Access infrastructure for research in Europe ���������������������������������� 127 Pedro Príncipe I know you know I quote: a strategic vision of publications in science �������� 135 João Fernando Ferreira Gonçalves Wine-growing science and technique – 30 years of challenges� �������������������� 149 J. Silvestre; S. Canas; J. Eiras Dias Part III THEORIES, METHODS AND CASE STUDIES IN SCIENCE COMMUNICATION Investigation in, about and through Art from the point of view of its publication: epistemological and validation aspects. ���������������������������� 157 Francisco Paiva Graphic argumentation: diagrammatic modeling in the communication of science �������������������������������������������������������������������� 177 Irene Machado Mapping digital methods: where science and technology studies and communication studies meet? ������������������������������������������������������������������������ 203 Chiara Carrozza and Tiago Santos Pereira In need of a better communication of mathematics in the press �������������������� 237 Susana Simões Pereira, José Manuel Pereira Azevedo and António José de Oliveira Machiavelo Notes on the authors ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 249 Introduction Nowadays the scientific community is the unequivocal result of the way these last years exponentially emphasized the challenge to define and stabilize parameters that allow communication and evaluation of science to benefit from the necessary credibility it takes to sustain a complex paradigm. Thought after – and as a result of – an international conference on Emerging Publication Models organized within a project devoted, precisely, to the Communication of Science, this book reflects and echoes, through thirteen essays, the concerns of thousands of researchers, professors, students and librarians who feel, about their work (about their future), the permanent pressure of a system whose intricate functioning, to some extent, remains unclear� Confined by the overwhelming growth of science, number of scientists and amount of published work; subdued by a parasite edition industry that flourishes from predatory publishing practices; allied to the predominance of a quantification logic grounded on the bewildering use of the impact factor, associated with schemes of cartelization or coercion thought to allow its magnification; unavoidably responsible for the increasing discredit of Open Access as a publishing model – this system and its agents demand from us, more than ever, a serious and thoughtful reflection about the strengthening of their logics and paradoxes. This is the main focus of the first of three parts that structure this book – Academic Integrity and Research & Evaluation Indicators� Jeffrey Beall is quite incisive in the way he dissects the destruction of research cultures – “traditions and practices of scholarly research, including those practices that work to ensure the authenticity, soundness, and importance of research”, deeply affected by the adulteration of publishing models within a predatory system “that favors authors with money and penalizes and disadvantages those without”, thus polluting scientific communication by replacing hard work, originality, merit and the roles of certification and validation that academic publishing traditionally granted. Another parallel consequence of the damage caused by the proliferation of predatory editors identified by this American [Communicating and Evaluating Science, pp. 1 - 6] 2 Communicating and Evaluating Science researcher and librarian has been the downfall of many open access journals and repositories enthusiastically created by college libraries and departments that, in time, faced the difficulties inflicted by the need to compete with the new status quo of academic publishing. A reality defined from the start by practices of authorship and citation manipulation such as honorary authorship, reciprocity, coercive citation or “citation cartels”, that Allen Wilhite’s essay not only identifies but also clarifies and puts into perspective, demonstrating how different pressures suffered at this level within academia are distorting its ethics� Nevertheless, the author remains optimistic. In spite of the several problems detected in the realm of peer reviewing, the inquiries made by Wilhite and Fong conclude not only that they are not impossible to solve, but also that the culture may be modified by the implementation of a transparency policy. “Perhaps the most encouraging sign is that in our review an overwhelming number of our respondents want to see these practices stopped”, he writes� However, we know that the use of production indicators, as a productivity measure as well as an evaluation instrument, has been gaining weight and relevance over the last decade. João Costa confirms it: “Scholarship competitions, curricula evaluations, research unit’s production evaluation have been gradually more dependent on the use of bibliometric indicators to assess the productivity of both individuals and research teams”� Which can be challenging when it’s time to guarantee that bibliometric databases are able to assure a correct representation of all scientific areas, given the deep disparity of their respective traditional publishing cultures (many of which privileging books and chapters instead of papers in indexed journals, for instance). A reflection we can also find in Sofia Fernandes’ essay about the unsuitability of a uniform application of these indicators to very dissimilar areas, disregarding each one’s own community and scientific culture. That is certainly the case of Social Sciences and Humanities, being known that the bibliometric databases of commercial base more used in evaluation processes (ISI Web of Science and Scopus) have serious problems to achieve an accurate representation of publishing results in most of these domains. As a result, João Costa, President of the Scientific Council for FCT’s Social Introduction 3 Sciences and Humanities leads the team that is now in charge of building/ adapting, to Portugal, an indicator of scientific production inspired in the one already implemented in Norway. “This model takes as fact, from the start, that all inserted data must have a broad coverage, that it must be transparently built (and not over commercially based principles) and assumes that the data can be used for different purposes”. This new quantitative paradigm that seems to be forcing academia to reshuffle goes further if we consider that even the evaluation of institutions is being increasingly defined by their own impact factors: an aggressive culture of rankings, that have appeared in large numbers over the last decade, with very different methodologies among them, as a result of an emerging and competitive market according to which universities have to design their functioning and surviving strategies� Paula Romão Pechincha, António Marques and José António Sarsfield Cabral’s essay helps us to understand the complex profile of the so called global rankings and their multiple typologies and classifications, with the purpose of better realizing if Portuguese universities may benefit from the improvement of their positions in these international indexes. “The fact of the matter is that appearing on the rankings - regardless of the degree of validity of the methodologies used - is in