Editorial—Quantifying the impact of hydrological studies (original) (raw)

Debate on Production, Evaluation, Storage and DisseminationScientific Information in the Digital Age

World reality is evolving faster than scientific research capacity is able to systematize its understanding. At the heart of globalization is technological development. Today we are experiencing a profound technological revolution. In the last twenty years more technological and scientific knowledge has been accumulated than in the entire history of mankind. This has a positive side due to the significant advances in terms of increasing productivity that has been achieved, due to advances in health, information and so many others. Technological progress has not had a corresponding advance in institutional terms, especially at the civilizational level, which makes it explosive for society.The globalization of information promotes the integration of research, seeking to contribute at the same time to a significant improvement in the production, peer review, retrieval, dissemination, interpretation, and usefulness of scientific information. The dissemination of knowledge is done through events, conferences, and publications. To understand a scientific field, whatever it may be, this research considered the possibility of analyzing the elements involved, the established relationships, the processes of production, evaluation, storage and dissemination of knowledge. Based on the quantitative and qualitative results of Web Science, it is possible to recognize and applaud the researchers who contribute the most / contributed to the development of different sciences / disciplines / areas of the scientific field, by analyzing their citations.The research proposes a global hybrid conceptual model of production, peer review, storage and dissemination of scientific knowledge, based on scientific publications (books, articles, conferences), on specialized journals, their evaluation models and the main units of measures used, as well as indexing, for the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Hierarchical models are proposed to separate the initiates from those who contribute the most (the highly cited) to the development of knowledge, the respective scientific field and its characteristics of universality. It contemplates the theoretical and practical discussion of the global conceptual model, the units of measurement and their meaning, in their different approaches.

The Status of Scientific Publication in the Information Age

The principal argument of this paper is that existing practices of scientific publishing ill-fit information-oriented sciences which are fundamentally concerned with complexity, constraint, uncertainty and contingency. It is argued that better exploitation of the full gamut of technological possibilities for scientific communication could support a much richer coordination of understanding between scientists. The barriers to achieving this lie with mechanisms of scarcity production in education, which are fundamentally driven by outdated publication practices. The argument builds on the social ontology of Searle, suggesting that scientific publishing declares " status functions " which simultaneously declare scarcity at many levels of education-in the process feeding economic mechanisms within education which have become pathological. In response, I argue that a richer ecology of types of communication by scholars exploiting and experimenting with new technologies can not only mitigate the pathology of publication, but can create better conditions for the advancement of learning and coordination of scientific understanding.

Extensive communication and the format of the online scientific journal, 2004

… Conference on Electronic …, 2004

The scientific journal has been greatly affected by the advent of its online digital accessibility. It is the priority publication medium for scientific communication, one of the document categories where changes in the electronic format uncover an extensive action, different from traditional practices. The extensive communication-a.k.a. the emblematic model of network interactions-comes as much in new forms of document production, as well as in the organization of the technical landscape in which scientific information adapts to flexible and unstable forms. Gradual changes (in support, format, content, and publication type) were observed in 400 online electronic journals, being all by main international publishers, as made available at CAPES portal (www.periodicos.capes.gov.br). The portal offers access to the complete text of a lot of publication, encyclopedias, databases, etc., supplied by editors and international distributors. In all the platforms we can find specific search tools that make possible bibliographical searches, alert services and other products and services, as well as information of technical and scientific interest. A data collection was assembled through a checklist for 70 variables, and the results were inserted in a spreadsheet for an initial analysis. Afterwards, data were cross-examined through the use of the SPSS software for statistical analysis. This investigation has shown that the new format stands out through the insertion of tools and services, strengthening extensive communication by means of interactivity, hypertextuality, and hypermediation, a. k. a., the main distinctive features of the electronic format. After technological resources mature the online format, they establish a new perception of the journal contents. The variables were grouped according to their pertinence to the studied aspects in the electronic format, and were expressed in percentage ratios. The results display the dependence of the electronic on the printed format. By combining all the variables once again to measure the levels of interactivity, hypertextuality, and hypermediation, journals were grouped by platform (i. e., the online publishing base as, for example, Scielo, Science Direct, Gale, OVID, etc.) to test for interactivity, hypertextuality, and hypermediation levels among platforms. The descriptive measures of indexes were first calculated: average, standard deviation, minimum value, maximum value, percentage ratios-among other data-to confirm level variations of each one of the characteristics among the platforms. Observing the grouping by platform, the results have shown evidence that a direct relationship (in other words, the most interactive groups are not necessarily the most hypertextual or hypermediatic ones) does not exist among the three characteristic features of the online electronic format. The online journal is using a communication in a differentiated dimension from the traditional system. The performance of the journals was also evaluated comparatively among platforms. At this stage in the evolution of electronic publishing, serious experimentation is needed. Models like CAPES Portal should be developed, allowing for continued expansion and enhancement of scholarly communication.

Liquid Journals: Knowledge Dissemination in the Web Era

In this paper we redefine the notion of "scientific journal" to update it to the age of the Web. We explore the historical reasons behind the current journal model, and we show that this model is essentially the same today, even if the Web has made dissemination essentially free. We propose a notion of liquid and personal journals that evolve continuously in time and that are targeted to serve individuals or communities of arbitrarily small or large scales. The liquid journals provide "interesting" content, in the form of "scientific contributions" that are "related" to a certain paper, topic, or area, and that are posted (on their web site, repositories, traditional journals) by "inspiring" researchers. As such, the liquid journal separates the notion of "publishing" (which can be achieved by submitting to traditional peer review journals or just by posting content on the Web) from the appearance of contributions into the ...