Are the tough times for Brazilian publications over?

This is the last issue scheduled to be published by the Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (AABC) this year. Here we gathered all the articles that had been in our journal for much longer than we would have liked and made a great effort to publish them still this year. Due to the reduction of financial support that impacted in the possibilities of expanding the number of publications, hard decisions had to be made. It was just not possible to publish all accepted manuscripts that we have received sooner.

As I have mentioned in previous editorial notes, there have been some difficult years for journals with little prospect of positive change (Kellner 2021a). Several factors are responsible for the reduction in financial support for research, including the edition of scientific periodicals. These include (but are not limited to) the deleterious effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which have contributed to increasing the asymmetry in global science funding in the US, China, and Europe compared to South America, including Brazil. It is very difficult to compete with journals edited in countries with strong economies where funding for scientific activities attract articles with greater impact potential. This is also the case regarding support for the payment of publication fees (e.g., Jahn & Tullney 2016, Alencar & Barbosa 2021).

To mitigate this situation, the AABC has attempted to attract more influential manuscripts by publishing special issues ranging from astronomy (Castilho et al. 2021) to paleontology (e.g., Pinheiro et al. 2021). We also decided to divide some areas, introducing new sections (Kellner 2021b), but the perspectives were not improving (Kellner 2021c).

The consequences of the lack of funding for Brazilian journals still persist, but last year AABC obtained funding from the Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ). Currently, all editors in the country are waiting for a change in policies from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), a foundation of the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation (MCTI), which traditionally supports Brazilian journals, in addition to being a fundamental national research financing agent.

As previously pointed out, there seems to be a lack of understanding on the part of Brazilian funding agencies that planning and time are crucial for a journal, but this is difficult to achieve, mainly due to the lack of predictability (Kellner 2017). So far, all grants for journals are limited to one year, which means that editors do not know in advance how much funding they will receive the following year. However, acceptance decisions are made within a given year. If funding falls or is being reduced, the journal will have already accepted a certain number of articles and will have to find a balance between increasing the rejection rate and postponing the publication of already accepted manuscripts.

In any case, there are some old issues in scientific publications (e.g., Rego 2014) that remain unresolved and some new challenges that are getting more in the focus (e.g., Brito et al. 2022), some of specific nature (e.g., Oliveira et al. 2021), which are not only restricted to Brazil or to the scientific community (e.g., Khamzina et al. 2021).

Anyway, publishing time is one of the most valuable assets for any journal and editors must work hard to make it as short as possible. It will be very interesting to evaluate the impact of the articles published in the present issue (AABC 95-4) compared to others. Meanwhile, editors, including this one who writes this text, wonder if the difficult times are over...

REFERENCES

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  18 Dec 2023
• Date of issue
  2023