Publishing at Any Cost? The Need for the Improvement of the Quality of Scholarly Publications

Abstract

At a time of great dynamism among publishers of scientific publications, with the inevitability of Open Access and the ease of publishing online at low cost, it is possible to find publications with different levels of scientific respectability. In this context, the improvement of the quality of scholarly publications emerges as a critical element for publishers, authors and academic institutions, as well as for society in general. This opinion piece discusses Open Access journals with different levels of quality, focusing on the following quality-promoting measures: blacklists, author’s preparation, and institutional prevention. The analysis allows concluding that the open review will be one of the key elements in the process of clarification and promotion of the level of quality and consequent scientific respectability of each of the Journals, of the thousands currently existing, a number that is likely to increase.

Future of Scholarly Publishing: A Perspective

“…Review is the usual peer-review in the control of scientific publication (12,22,(24)(25)(26)(27), with an increase in open review being expected (16). Ferreira and Serpa (24) argued that peer-reviews, in most cases still closed to the public domain and part of the internal process of publishers, should be made public, as well as their authors, in order to contribute to the "[...] accountability and subsequent legitimation of the scientific quality of what is published by allowing greater control over what is publishable and published, in a control that also takes place 'a posteriori' of the publication" (p. 11).…”

“…Open access (OA) publishing despite its variability is (14), in the authors' opinion, an inevitability, despite the disparities in acceptance depending on the scientific area in question (2,16,18,(28)(29)(30)(31). Sá and Serpa offered as an example of this orientation toward open access publishing "[...] the recent phenomenon of OA publishing platforms commissioned by funding organizations" (2, p. 82).…”

“…scientific priority (registration), peer review (certification), archiving (preservation) and dissemination, have become the foundations for nearly all scientific journals today" (7, p.1), being in profound change (8)(9)(10)(11)(12) and that affects researchers, editors, publishers, funders, policymakers, academics, and representatives of universities, industry, media, and the general public like stakeholders (13,14), in a society increasingly shaped by the digital (1,15). As Sá et al (16) mentioned, this also shapes new ethical and quality issues of credible publications in digital open access (17), fostered, also, by the COVID-19 pandemic both in form (18) and in the speed of the production cycle (12) (Table 1).…”

Writing in Science

“…A scientific manuscript is never written in its final form in the first version (Renck Jalongo & Saracho, 2016). This is especially visible in the current context of scientific production and dissemination, in which the process of scientific publishing is undergoing a profound reformulation (Neill, 2019;Sá et al, 2020;Serpa, 2019aSerpa, , 2019b. Examples of this are, among other features, the unstoppable process of open access, the pre-print publication, the rise of open review, the rise of the centrality of the scientific impact and the increasing centrality of social networks (Ferreira & Serpa, 2018c, 2018d.…”

“…The writing of a scientific paper is, then, undeniably relevant to science itself, the academics' career and the students' success, especially graduate students Sanganyado, 2019;Sayer, 2019;Ramírez-Castañeda, 2020;Jusino, 2020;Badenhorst & Xu, 2016;Chen, 2019;Phillips Galloway, Qin, Uccelli, & Barr, 2019). However, this topic still needs to be clarified to improve the researchers' scientific writing competences (Huerta & Garza, 2019;Wortman-Wunder & Wefes, 2020;Renck Jalongo & Saracho, 2016;Sá et al, 2020), although each journal provides specific information in the guidelines for authors (Flores-Mir, 2019;Sanganyado, 2019;Mestres & Sampathkumar, 2019;Wickman & Fitzgerald, 2018;Neill, 2019).…”