A workshop in Rio to debate about the challenges facing interdisciplinary journals
The 1st International Workshop. Challenges facing interdisciplinary journals: experiences from the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Latin America in history, the social sciences, and the humanities was held in Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro, 22-24 June 2016. From Eä Journal we participated on the event, discussing possibilities, challenges and difficulties in open access publishing.
In recent years, the editors and editorial staffs of interdisciplinary journals have faced a combination of old and new challenges when it comes to assert its positioning, enhancing their management practices, and improving the quality and visibility of their publications.
These challenges have been especially difficult for the scholarly journals focused on Latin America. The growing demands from national and international scientific systems, project evaluation and universities, the wide spreading and of indexes, rankings and their criteria, the need to reach audiences from different fields and nationalities have generated growing complexities of the task of the scientific editors. However, this increasingly complex nature has not had a space for discussion about problems, limitations and common challenges of current science publishing.
The 1st International Workshop. Challenges facing interdisciplinary journals: experiences from the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Latin America in history, the social sciences, and the humanities provided debate space for editors on Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Chile, among other Latin American Countries, and United Kingdom, to share their experiences. The event allowed discussing the current situation, strategies adopted by each journal and obtained learnings. This allowed a collective effort, which involved over 25 editors of scientific journals, to rethink practices and strategies for generating sustainable editorial policies, paths and meanings of journal internationalization, peer review practices, indexing, new alternatives for fast-publication (fast tracks, “first views”, open repositories),involvement of wider audiences, spreading of open access policies in science publishing, use of social media tools, among others.
The workshop was held as a part of a joint project between the Brazilian journal História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, published by the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fiocruz, and the Journal of Latin American Studies, published by Cambridge University Press and counted with the support of the British Academy. Throughout the three days, the discussion deployed along four main axis:
• Strategies and controversies for internationalization
• New scenarios and challenges of open access policies
• New and old concerns of authors, editors and reviewers (peer review, ethics, editorial policies)
• The role of social networks in science publishing
The workshop constituted an opportunity for editors from Latin America and the United Kingdom to start the discussion on current and future agendas regarding the editing, indexing, and impact of interdisciplinary journals in the fields of the human and social sciences.
Editors and Coordinators:
Marcos Cueto (Science editor, HCSM)
André Felipe Cândido da Silva (Science editor, HCSM)
Roberta Cardoso Cerqueira (Executive editor, HCSM)
