Excellence or quality? Impact of the current competition regime on science and scientific publishing in Latin America and its implications for development

Abstract

The current competition regime that characterizes international science is often presented as a quest for excellence. It diversely affects research in Latin America and research in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. This article asks how this competition regime may orient the direction of research in Latin America, and to whose advantage. It is argued that, by relating excellence to quality differently,

“Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence

“…A funding programme ARTICLE PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | DOI: 10.1057DOI: 10. /palcomms.2016 that looks to improve a nation's research capacity by differentially rewarding "excellence" can have the paradoxical effect of reducing this capacity by underfunding the very forms of "normal" work that make science function (Kuhn [1962] 2012) or distract attention from national priorities and well-conducted research towards a focus on performance measures of North America and Europe (Vessuri et al, 2014). A programme that seeks to reward Humanists, similarly, by focussing on output in "high impact" academic journals paradoxically reduces the impact of these same disciplines by encouraging researchers to focus on their professional peers rather than broader cultural audiences (Readings, 1996), reducing the domain's relevance even as its performance of "excellence" improves.…”

La reinterpretación de visibilidad y calidad en las nuevas políticas de evaluación de revistas científicas

“…El nuevo enfoque para medir el impacto a través de citas de las políticas colombianas y mexicanas asigna poco valor a las revistas locales y regionales (al igual que señalan Beigel y Salatino, 2015, en su análisis de circuitos de revistas argentinas). Aquí coincidimos con Vessuri et al (2013) cuando dicen que "si la ciencia de América Latina quiere internacionalizarse sobre una base sólida, debería dejar de interpretar erróneamente que la ciencia del Atlántico Norte es la totalidad de la ciencia mundial" (p. 12). O, dicho de otra manera, se debería dejar de interpretar erróneamente que la mejor manera de mejorar la investigación es a través de acoplarse a un modelo de ciencia desarrollado para un sistema de ciencia de otra parte del mundo.…”

Should Indian Researchers Pay to Get their Work Published?

“…Long before the OA movement began, the funding community led by the São Paulo Science Foundation (FAPSEP) and the information community led by the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information recognized the need for strengthening the visibility of the Brazilian journals, and initiated the SciELO movement in São Paulo, in 1997, which later spread to Chile and the rest of Ibero-America and South Africa 8 . As pointed out by Vessuri et al 9 , a strong sense of public mission among Latin American universities, coupled with the realization that OA improves the presence and impact of their research publications led Latin America to develop its own knowledge exchange mechanisms on its own terms.…”