Libraries and librarians as coadjutants in the editorial process of scientific publications - reaffirming a proposal

Abstract

Editorial Libraries and librarians as coadjutants in the editorial process of scientific publications -reaffirming a proposalFor a long time, I have been describing the trajectory of the Brazilian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences. During those years, we have been discussing about our contribution to the promising scenario of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Being optimist, we have shown the evolution of the publication through the implemented editorial improvement. We keep discussing optimistically many important topics, presenting our challenges, history, process of internationalization and our thinking about many questions. This fruitful experience emphasizes that we librarians cannot go ahead with the old profile, restricted to being the knowledge guardians, responsible for registration, processing and preservation of the collections, along with being intermediates of information by providing access to documents and assisting the capacitation of the users. Expanding our actuation in the generation and certification of the knowledge is of utmost importance. Brazilian Journal of Pharmaceutical SciencesWe know the information is universally available, independently from the place of access. So, it is very important to redefine the roles of librarians and libraries, as discussed by Crow et al. (2012). Accordingly, North-American libraries have been expanding their roles in academic publications, offering many services as pre-publication and editorial support. In addition, they emphasize the need for a practical orientation about the challenges and opportunities the programs of library-based publication can offer. BJPS statistic data that follow can prove this thesis and we think this is an example to be considered.The year 2015 was very hard toward advancing BJPS quality as a reliable publication on Pharmaceutical Sciences. The indexers organs are more and more demanding and sustainability has always been a big challenge, but we believe we have conquered national and international recognition. Since 2011, BJPS was included in the Science Citation Index and its impact index advance can be evidenced in Graph 1, which presents statistical data according to Scimago/Elsevier (http:qqwww.scimagojr.com/journalsearch. php?q=q19700182901&tip=sid).We received in 2015, 254 submissions and we had 408 processes under analysis (Graph 2). From this total, 138 manuscripts were refused, corresponding to around 34% of the submitted works (Graph 3). This reflects the severity in the evaluation we have achieved thanks to the reviewers' commitment. It is worth noting that the pre-analysis of the manuscripts either related to formal aspects, by the Executive Editor, or concerning the quality and scope framing, by the Associated Editors, has contributed to these numbers. In 2015, the BJPS had published 94 articles, keeping stble the number of publications (Graphs 4 and 5) Concerning the origin of the published papers (Graph 6), there was a small increase in those developed by specialists from the University of Sao Paulo in co-authorship...