It is not a crisis itself, if does not promote changes

ECONOMIC CRISIS

Brazil has been going through crisis in the past three years, due to often and systemic cuts in funds in multiple fields of society, such as education, health, science and technology, affecting directly on Brazilian scientific production. The nursing scientific production - as being an integrative part - now experiences a phase of quantitative decline in the global share, opposite to the exponential phase verified in the last decade, in other words, reduced amounts of articles are being published and it can affect the nursing scientific production in the international scenario.

THE RESTRAINED DEMAND

Promotion agencies - allocating funds - effectively support the Brazilian nursing scientific production, and create meritocratic mechanisms more and more elaborated to offer less, for fewer people. It is directly reflected on Stricto Sensu Post-Graduate/ Masters and PhD, potential producers of scientific knowledge and innovation. Coordinators now expect more from their faculty, thus, having obvious repercussion over learners.

This nefarious policy encourages the low-quality publication, the salami science phenomenon, and the "integrative reviews of complete texts in Portuguese". The pseudoscience concept is a clear symptom of what nursing has been trying to shun for some time. Promotion agencies decide to who they will offer less - based on the indexes established by indexers and publishers unavailable by the huge majority of nursing journals - since the standardization established for insertion in those bases presuppose a compromising financial contribution, including for the largest journals in Brazil.

So, the cruel bibliometrics principles logic is perpetuated, well established by the laws of Lotka (Inverse Square Law), Bradford and Zip. Most journals' only chance of survival is passing on costs imposed by publishers for authors to keep themselves in the scenario and aspire from indexers bases the upward trend of bibliometric indexes.

Editors in Brazil, carry out a volunteer work that exceeds their work time established in their contract - as all university activities are unchangeable - as graduation and undergraduate classes, guidance, support for university students in practical field, need for publication, preparation and correction of tests, submission of proposals to notices, extension and innovation projects, among others.

TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT AND ACCESS TO INFORMATION

The restrained demand encourages the publication of publication's sake to gain shelter due to the technological development and access to information. New bases and means of access are daily built. Since 2014, it has been registered a longer time surfing on the internet through mobile devices instead of in desktops or notebooks⁽¹⁾.

Technological development helped a lot to the access to information, in a way that surveys result now a flow worldwide in a speed never seen before. The same technological development, on the other hand, enables more incidents of plagiarisms commonly known as self-plagiarism, duplicate publication, redundant publication, falsification or data manufacturing, image manipulation, animal or human wellbeing, conflict of interest, authorship⁽²⁾ or any other that may appear. When talking about harmful consequences technology brings, there are tricks to manipulate protected paperwork, irregular access to private content of magazines and bases, among others. This same technology, however, evidently creates protection mechanisms as well as the development of plagiarism detection systems even more elaborate and accurate.

So, from the convergence of factors about the economic crisis, the restrain demand and the technological development with access to information arises a proper environment for breaking the current system.

Thomas Kuhn's classic work - The Structure of Scientific Revolution⁽³⁾ - presents a reasonable model of science conception defending the theory that the typical development of a scientific discipline takes place during an open structure, composing the pre-paradigmatic stage, normal science crisis, revolution, new normal science, new crisis, new revolution, etc.

The creative and audacious members of scientific community propose alternatives of paradigms at crises situations. Since the confidence on the current paradigm has been lost, the referred alternatives shall be considered by a growing number of scientists. It follows from a period of discussions and discrepancies over the science fundamentals that refer, in part, to what occurred in the pre-paradigmatic stage.

A creative possibility of alternative is encountered by the Brazilian nursing journals, not necessarily excluding the current model. The Editors Forum of the Associação Brasileira de Enfermagem congregates more than 40 journals, effectively representing the Brazilian scientific production's status quo. The Virtual Health Library - Nursing group incorporates Brazilian and Latin American editors in a network of collaboration. The nursing journal basis - REVENF- was originally hosted on the BIREME-OPAS-OMS (Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information) portal - which has migrated to a private portal impairing the transference of all journals in view of the costs involved - since each journal should pay or pass on costs of their maintenance in the REVENF, now having a structure similar to a publisher.

There are some free cooperation initiatives of Integrated Management of Scientific Journals, currently enabling bibliometric calculation among journals inserted in them. The most disseminated example is the Canadian group of PKP (Public Knowledge Project)⁽⁴⁾ as a multicollege initiative of open source software development and research conduction to provide quality, and academic publication coverage. Thus, it would be possible to manage a low-cost replicate in nursing portals and other fields. Hopefully, the journals presence will not be opposed or impaired on bases and indexers already reached, however, contribute for strengthening a democratic environment with free access to authors, editors and readers, which are the reason of the journals existence.

A not harmful editors' solidary audacity to the scope and intrinsic ambitions of each journal may constitute a decisive action in order to grow the visibility for Brazilian journals and reduce costs for authors.

REFERENCES

• ¹
  Chaffey D. Mobile Marketing Statistics compilation [Internet]. 2016[cited 2017 Aug 30]. Available from: http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/
  » http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/
• ²
  Committee on publication ethics. COPE. Flowchart [Internet]. 2016 [cited 2017 Aug 30]. Available from: http://publicationethics.org/files/Full%20set%20of%20English%20flowcharts_9Nov2016.pdf
  » http://publicationethics.org/files/Full%20set%20of%20English%20flowcharts_9Nov2016.pdf
• ³
  Kuhn TS. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2 ed., enlarged. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press; 1970.
• ⁴
  Public Knowledge Project. PKP. Website[Internet]. 2017 [cited 2017 Aug 30]. Available from: https://pkp.sfu.ca/
  » https://pkp.sfu.ca/

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Jan-Feb 2018