Executive editor of Bahiana Journals will represent institution at meeting on Open Science

A Escola Bahiana de Medicina e Saúde Pública will be represented by the institution's professor and executive editor of the Bahiana Journals, João de Deus Barreto Segundo, at the 1st Meeting of Technologies and Open Science, which will be promoted by the Institute of Communication and Scientific and Technological Information in Health (entity linked to Fiocruz), on the 26th and 27th of June, in Rio de Janeiro, with online transmission. In this first edition, the meeting's theme is "Challenges of scientific communication: open science, sustainability and OJS (Open Journal Systems)".

"Open science: a question of infrastructure or behavior?". This will be the theme of Professor João de Deus' lecture, which will take place on the first day of the event and can be attended by Fiocruz channel on YouTube. According to the professor, the concept of Open Science refers, in short, to the set of infrastructures, practices and procedures proposed in the last three decades by various agents in the research and scientific publishing ecosystem, capable of allowing greater transparency and, subsequently, greater reproducibility to contemporary scientific production. "It ranges from the proposal for free and immediate access to published content (Open Access) to the sharing of datasets and code for independent retesting of the results of other scientists' research. The movement in favor of this reform is neither monadic nor uniform, being decentralized and plural in voices. However, in general, these voices aim to increase the reliability of research reports. Ultimately, it is a journey towards better ethics in scientific publishing." Aligned with the Open Science movement, João de Deus highlights, “paying a lot to publish non-transparent science, in a context where there are more and more researchers and less and less funding, is unsustainable. Each time funding is allocated to pay publication fees, it is no longer allocated to purchasing inputs, improving research infrastructure and qualifying national human resources through grants”.

According to João de Deus, the main barriers to this opening of science are transnational publishers that aim for profit, configuring an oligopoly, and the lack of adequate legislation to regulate the scientific publications sector. "If it were an oligopoly of oil or microchip production, some regulatory body with international reach would have already given its opinion. In other words, these are profitable companies that are not treated as companies by governments. There is the argument that the incentive system (for access to funding) values ​​journals with the highest citation performance, which generally belong to commercial publishers in the oligopoly, with which I agree. And there is also a dimension of irrationality on the part of researchers: if commercial journals are less transparent, why do authors prefer them? Are researchers consuming scientific content based on brand and not on scientific quality?", he asks. All content from the scientific journals that make up the portal Bahiana Journals are available for free access and download in the Diamond Open Access modality.