The journal Matéria becomes an "innovation study-case"
As the 59th Annual Meeting of the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science - SBPC - was held, from July 8th through 13th, 2007, in Belém, Pa, a Round Table took place on the subject: "The Role of the Scientific and Technological Organizations on Activities for the Innovation". The successful development of the Journal Materia was considered a theme for an analysis about innovation. The reason for that is because the journal, created in a period in which the internet gave its first steps, pioneered the phenomenon of a scientific journal conceived to exist only in a site of the "big network", not having been printed on paper to then migrate to a virtual environment, as has been the case for the conventional scientific journals. This situation, very peculiar for the period it happened, has forced the journal's Editorial Board to innovate in several ways, which include: 1) the creation of new symbols not yet existent for programming in html; 2) the creation of the new articles reviewing restricted access system - SARRA -, which allowed the independent "virtual handling" of articles by authors, reviewers and editors; 3) the introduction of a new philosophy of scientific articles, bearing shorter main texts, but making use of hiperlinks for specific explanations, mathematical developments, laboratory rigs, etc. and yet offering to the scientific-technological community belonging to the Area of Materials and its related areas a free-access highly qualified scientific journal. It is worth mentioning that the Journal Materia strongly suggests its authors to publish in their native language, with a clear objective to establish a local scientific culture in Latin language, as a way to increase the self-confidence of young Latin-American researchers.
The successful return gotten back form such an effort was highly compensating. The journal has nowadays the preference of a significant number of Latin-American researchers, its target public, it is part of the important SciELO Library and has reached in June 2007 30,000 accesses per month, about 1,000 accesses in every day of that month. The increase in the number of accesses is building a steep ascending curve during the year of 2007 and also in comparison with previous years, in which period an important increase on the number of articles submitted, reviewed and published by the journal has steadily been observed.
The SBPC interest on the innovations presented by the Journal Materia is the result of an active and effective participation of the Latin-American scientific community, either as an author, as a peer-reviewer or as a reader. I'd like to use this opportunity to invite you to go on participating and also to invite other colleagues of yours to join the effort to make and to keep on going a highly qualified scientific journal.
Cordially,
Paulo Emílio V. de Miranda
Editor-in-Chief
Journal Matéria (http://www.materia.coppe.ufrj.br)
(http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php/script_sci_serial/pid_1517_7076/lng_pt/nrm_iso )
e-mail: materia@labh2.coppe.ufrj.br
July 2007
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
12 Sept 2007 -
Date of issue
2007
