Worldwide outlook of geology journals: Challenges in South America

DAMBORENEA, S.E.

Calgary, Canada

Workshop; 41st Annual Meeting, Association of Earth Science Editors; 2007

Association of Earth Science Editors

South American scientific periodicals are usually regarded as “obscure journals” due to their difficult access and low visibility. The unfortunate result is that a large amount of science produced locally is effectively “lost”. Scientists, librarians and science administrators regard these negative aspects as their main challenge. In some countries, science organizations are making great efforts promote their best journals and increase their national and international visibility. The application of local ranking systems for science journals by national scientific agencies has resulted in better products. Regarding on-line access, there are at least two large regional enterprises which provide free on-line access to some of the best journals: SciElo  and Red ALyC, but the participation of earth science South American journals in these is still poor (6 and 2 respectively). Several institutional web sites house their own journals immediately after printing, and there are a few fully electronic journals. In fact, South American journals amount to 20 % of all geology journals freely accessible on-line. But the key challenge for editors is to obtain good manuscripts from local authors. This is not easy, due to the widespread misuse of international “impact factors” for the evaluation of scientists´ personal performance, paradoxically by the same national science organizations that try to promote the local journals. From about 200 formal scientific publications related to the earth sciences in South America, only two are regularly covered by the Science Citation Index, although about a third are considered by other indices. The survey includes journals published by professional associations, universities and government institutions. They range from those exclusively local in scope, of irregular appearance and hardly to be regarded as periodicals, to those which are indistinguishable in coverage and editorial quality from similar ones produced in developed countries. Of course these last ones still share the general problems of lack of stable financial support, lack of technical staff and infrastructure and limited appreciation by society at large. To these, a pervasive fragility should be added: there is a high turnover rate and constant uncertainty about the future of the journals. Awareness of this situation is the first step to devise good publication policies.