Comment to Nature´s 490 editorial on Global Reach

MONJEAU, JORGE ADRIAN; RAPOPORT, EDUARDO H.

NATURE

NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2012 vol. 490 p. 1 - 1

0028-0836

A recent special issue of Nature 490, 18 October 2012; explores data on scientist migrations around the world, claiming that the idea of brain drain is being replaced by brain circulation, in which ideas move fluently worldwide. Acknowledging that interactions within a globalized scientific community has positive effects on developing countries, the standards of scientific quality assessment that have been imposed on the world scientific community question the decline of the brain drain. Undoubtedly, the impact factor or IF has become a global indicator of scientific prestige. However, it has advantages and disadvantages asymmetrically distributed through the global scientific community. For countries that are building their own scientific capacity to solve their own problems, the IF acts as a market product that mirrors the impacts of multinational companies: a- it crushes the growth initiatives of local scientific journals, which cannot form a substantial part of the overall IF scenario; b- it dilutes the national identity forcing scientists from developing countries to focus on topics of interest in the leading magazines; c- it homogenizes the scientific thought in one mainstream paradigm, at the expense of the creativity and new insights that can arise from a true multicultural interaction. Thus, one of the most devastating effects of IF is that it conveys scientific efforts worldwide to fuel the growth of scientific and technological systems of the leading countries at the expense of the weakening of local systems. In this sense, the IF has become the modern version of the brain drain: the brains of talented scientists can be absorbed by the core countries without the old-fashioned need for mobility.