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Por Palazzo, sexta-feira, 17 maio 2013

Putting science into the assessment of research

There is a pressing need to improve the ways in which the output of scientific research is evaluated by funding agencies, academic institutions, and other parties.

To address this issue, a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals met during the Annual Meeting of The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) in San Francisco, CA, on December 16, 2012. The group developed a set of recommendations, referred to as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. We invite interested parties across all scientific disciplines to indicate their support by adding their names to this Declaration.

The outputs from scientific research are many and varied, including: research articles reporting new knowledge, data, reagents, and software; intellectual property; and highly trained young scientists. Funding agencies, institutions that employ scientists, and scientists themselves, all have a desire, and need, to assess the quality and impact of scientific outputs. It is thus imperative that scientific output is measured accurately and evaluated wisely.

The Journal Impact Factor is frequently used as the primary parameter with which to compare the scientific output of individuals and institutions. The Journal Impact Factor, as calculated by Thomson Reuters, was originally created as a tool to help librarians identify journals to purchase, not as a measure of the scientific quality of research in an article. With that in mind, it is critical to understand that the Journal Impact Factor has a number of well-documented deficiencies as a tool for research assessment. These limitations include: A) citation distributions within journals are highly skewed [1–3]; B) the properties of the Journal Impact Factor are field-specific: it is a composite of multiple, highly diverse article types, including primary research papers and reviews [1, 4]; C) Journal Impact Factors can be manipulated (or “gamed”) by editorial policy [5]; and D) data used to calculate the Journal Impact Factors are neither transparent nor openly available to the public [4, 6, 7].

The original site and support page

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Por Palazzo, sábado, 27 abril 2013

Um problema interessante que teremos que enfrentar são os direitos dos robôs. Se os avanços da Inteligência Artificial permitirem, um dia, a fabricação de robôs com capacidades emotivas semelhantes às dos humanos como agiremos em função de sus direitos? Este problema está se avizinhando com a utilização de robôs domésticos e de atendimento hospitalar. A Coréia do Sul deve introduzir estes direitos até o ano de 2020. É evidente que a visão animista existente nos países da região facilitam a perçepção dos robôs como entes providos de algo mais que a materialidade.

Should robots have the same rights as you or I? What rights do you and I enjoy because of our intelligent, self-aware status? These questions are complex, but they will certainly have real-world consequences for robots at some point in the not-too-distant future. Should robots reach the level of self-awareness and show genuine intelligence, we must be prepared to treat them as sentient beings, and respect their desires, wants and needs as we respect those things in our human society.

Failure to recognize and grant these rights to non-human artificial intelligences would be similar to early western cultures’ failure to recognize the humanity and attendant rights of non-European peoples. Outward differences in appearances should in no way affect our ethical treatment of self-aware, intelligent beings.

Acesso ao site

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Por Palazzo, sexta-feira, 19 abril 2013

Com a enorme pressão para publicar ou morrer (publish-or-perish) tem surgido um grande número de publicações fantasmas. Como consequência temos recebido chamadas para periódicos e conferências duvidosas. Leiam o texto e a lista destas publicações para não cairem na armadilha.

Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals

This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access journals. We recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards.  The criteria for determining predatory journals are here.

We hope that tenure and promotion committees can also decide for themselves how importantly or not to rate articles published in these journals in the context of their own institutional standards and/or geo-cultural locus.  We emphasize that journals change in their business and editorial practices over time. This list is kept up-to-date to the best extent possible but may not reflect sudden, unreported, or unknown enhancements

Full list and post