The Matéria journal has recently contributed to accelerate the way accepted articles are made available by creating the Pre-publication scheme [11 MIRANDA, P.E.V. de “Pré-publicação de artigos na revista Matéria,” Matéria (Rio de Janeiro), v. 25, n. 3, e-12838, 2020.]. In addition to that, lately the editorial team took a decision that will guarantee the financial self-sustainability of the journal and will also contribute to swift and improve the quality of the publishing and editing processes.
The Matéria journal has always acted within an open access regime and will continue to do so. Our editorial board aims not only to grant wide access to scientific content besides guarantees it and makes it available to all public, which is a vital pilar of this journal’s history.
Inevitably, the open access scheme generates costs towards our administrative structure. Yet, added to that, lies the great difficulty to obtain constant funding to the journal’s regular activities since the financial support of governmental bodies is rather eventual. The efforts to cover for the journal’s financial costs have been raising considerably over the last few years whilst the financial support decreases and processing costs increase. Apart from costs, the current publishing flow of Matéria, which receives more than 1,000 manuscripts to be evaluated per year and publishes around a quarter of them, has led our team to seek for a more efficient path. Therefore, we opted to transfer all our editorial processes to SciELO and thereby, our editorial board will be exclusively focused on scientific procedures such as manuscripts’ selection and peer-reviewing process, thus targeting to increase the quality of our publications.
July 2021 marks the changes of our editorial procedures and the beginning of the article processing charging (APC) towards the authors of accepted manuscripts that have been submitted to Matéria journal from July onwards. With the objective of continuing as a non-profit journal, we are now supported by the Brazilian Hydrogen Association (ABH2) and the fees of APCs are fixed and depicted in the Table below. The APCs are meant to cover for the fixed costs of publishing/editing, and we reinforce that they are below the current general market prices.
By charging APC, the journal won’t need to rely upon cash flow of funds originated from governmental bodies since the publishing process, as well as its inevitable costs, will be tied to the APC’s payment by the authors. Therefore, the estimated time between manuscript’s submission and its actual online publishing will significantly drop. Furthermore, it is important to highlight – which has already been aforementioned – that the Editorial Board will then be solely focused on the scientific content thus obliterating the necessity of spending hours with the editing procedures, which are now SciELO’s responsibility. This will impact positively towards the quality of the peer-reviewing process, which our Editorial Board continues to be accountable for.
Yet, it’s important to note that the changes herewith pictured were extensively discussed between the Editor-in-Chief, Associated Editors, Assistant Editors, the Editorial Support team, as well as SciELO’s staff, to make sure that everyone involved in the process could deliver their contribution to this important moment of the journal’s history. Finally, we guarantee that the authors that have already submitted their manuscripts before 1st July 2021 will be exempted from APC, thus keeping a smooth and transparent transition.
BIBLIOGRAFIA
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1MIRANDA, P.E.V. de “Pré-publicação de artigos na revista Matéria,” Matéria (Rio de Janeiro), v. 25, n. 3, e-12838, 2020.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
11 Oct 2021 -
Date of issue
2021
