Amid these pandemic times, we hope that everyone is well and healthy. This editorial is dedicated to those fighting scientific denialism and social oppression.

Thus, it is with joy that we write this text to the readers of RBPEC, to begin a dialogue about our journal.

The Brazilian Journal of Research in Science Education was established in 2001 and officially launched at the III National Meeting of Research in Science Education (III ENPEC), which was held in Atibaia, SP, between November 7th-10th, 2001. The journal has been published three times annually since then and adopted a continuous publication mode in 2019.

As you may know, the journal has been not only classified as A2 according to QUALIS CAPES (the Brazilian official system for classifying scientific production) between 2013-2016 in the fields of Education and Teaching, but also indexed in databases such as DOAJ, Latindex, IRESIE, Redalyc, among others. This demonstrates its role in terms of dissemination within our field of knowledge, which is the result of a collective work between editors, peers, and authors. We are thankful to all of you who make part of RBPEC, for your collaborative, solidary and voluntary work.

Besides, RBPEC aims to share results and reflections based on research conducted with ethics and relevance, in order to contribute in consolidating the field and in research training, as well as in production of knowledge on Science Education aligned with ENPEC, including: Teaching and Learning of Scientific Concepts and Processes; Teacher training; History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science; Education in Non-Formal Spaces and Scientific Dissemination; Environmental education; Health education; Languages and Discourse in Natural Sciences; Scientific and Technological Literacy, CTS/CTSA Approaches; Curricula and Educational Policies; Differences, Multiculturalism, and Interculturality.

We took over the Editorial Board in November 2021, and we take this opportunity to acknowledge the competent work of editors and editorial assistants who preceded us. Thanks to all of you.

After a transition period, with the team hired in February 2022, it was decided that the five regions of the country should be represented, as well as that we should embrace this new reality in a way to outline good communication practices and, at the same time, ensure that the journal is indexed in other databases. We could not fail to mention the work and involvement of the new editorial assistant (Jonathan Atkinson), for his partnership and excellent work.

During the pandemic, we have emphasized the importance of Science and Technology, while we have seen the resurgence of denialist and fascist groups, in addition to social and political setbacks. Thus, we highlight the importance of scientific and technological education as well as of research in science education for Brazilian society, in order to shout to the four corners of the world that we need to work towards a more just society. Our research is a constant struggle for citizenship rights that still must be developed and demonstrated each and every day. In line with our objective, we will seek to strengthen this network that can be synthesized in this scientific community, in the community of educators, graduate and undergraduate students, among others.

One of our goals is to be part of the Open Science movement. To do so, journals need to adopt “good editorial practices”, so that they can be part of the Scielo network. Thus, we intend to follow these three dimensions of action (Scielo, 2020, p.7):

1. Inclusion of preprints in SciELO’s scholarly communication flow carried out by journals from Brazil in convergence with quality journals from abroad. A preprint is defined as a manuscript ready for submission to a journal, which is deposited on trusted preprint servers before or in parallel with submission to a journal. The use of preprints is the author’s option and choice, and the journals should adapt their policies to accept the submission of manuscripts previously deposited on a preprint server recognized by the journal.

2. Sharing of data, codes, methods, and other materials used and resulting from research that are usually underlying the texts of articles published by the journals. This sharing is the responsibility of the researchers involved in the research, who must inform the journal of it when submitting the manuscript. Journals should encourage and demand that the contents underlying the articles be duly cited and referenced. Optionally, journals can require that this content be made available in open access in line with open data policies.

3. Progressive opening of the peer review process of manuscripts. SciELO considers three opening advancement options: (a) publication, at the end of the article, of the name or names of the editors responsible for the evaluation;(b) offer referees the option of dialoguing directly with the corresponding author, with or without opening their identities; (c) offer the option of publishing the approval assessment reviews of articles with or without identifying the reviewers. Reviews constitute a new type of literature in the SciELO methodology and receive treatment like research articles (generally published in the form of comments).

We understand that presenting these dimensions aimed at the Open Science movement will guide our actions in the short, medium, and long term.

For 2022 and beyond, we have some ideas that we would like to share with you. They are characterized as organizational principles with monitoring parameters and goals that meet the principles defended by SciELO (2020, p.5):

1. the concept of scientific knowledge as a global public good;

2. networking as a means of maximizing scalability in terms of cost-effectiveness and adoption of the state of the art in scientific editing, cooperation, and management of asymmetries between collections, thematic areas and journals;

3. quality control, compliance with standards, good practices, and innovations in scholarly communication.

Based on these ideas, we understand communication as a process that goes beyond the articulation between languages, codes, signs, meaning: an event of multimodal and intersubjective interaction in a dynamic of construction of unpredictable, unique, unrepeatable, and unexpected meanings (Silva e Silva, 2012).

Through this approach, we have been asking ourselves to what extent the RBPEC has given too much priority to just internal communication, within the scientific community. Therefore, one of our goals is to create/strengthen different channels, also with an audience outside the science education research community. It is what leads us to reflections such as: Who do we speak to? Who should we speak to?

One of the first points that we think about for 2022 (short term) is to draw up a Communication Plan for the RBPEC, which will guide other actions, including the Editorial Development Plan for the coming years.

We think of an evaluation based on three questions: WHO SPEAKS, WHAT WE SPEAK, WHO WE SPEAK TO.

WHO SPEAKS: Among authors, the RBPEC has emphasized communication, but it requires advances in terms of an agile and interactive communication channel between readers, evaluators and other journal networks. Although we write one editorial a year, the voice of the editors still cannot be heard well.

Based on this evaluation, one of our short-term proposals (we hope that by the end of 2022) is to align our journal with SciELO’s nomenclature, and, in the medium term, to define a policy for preservation of digital resources, with backup and migration of all data to the ABRAPEC website.

WHAT WE SPEAK: RBPEC is in continuous publication mode, focused on research articles in the field of Science Education. The topics are not indexed, and keywords used throughout the articles have not been recollected.

In the short and medium term, our objective is to carry out a survey of the types and topics of articles published in the last five years, with the aim of bringing more themes and kinds of documents; to align the themes with those expected by ENPEC; to propose new types of dissemination.

WHO WE SPEAK TO: The scope of RBPEC defines it as an ABRAPEC publication whose objective is to share results and reflections based on research conducted with ethics and relevance, in order to contribute to the consolidation of the field of Science Education and in research training, as well as in production of knowledge on Science Education, which intend to support the development of responsible educational actions committed to improving scientific education and social well-being. However, it does not specify the target audience.

Our proposal is to review the scope, in order to improve clarity and align it to the thematic lines of Enpec, in addition to seeking ways and means to encourage communication with all of our readers.

Some of the actions we undertake:

(a) to use tools such as social media where we post news without a formal informative standard, in what we call Science Education Chat.

(b) to keep up our idea of inviting authors to send a picture along with a message about their article as another way of making published articles more visible; to facilitate dialogue with readers, and to assist in scientific dissemination to the public. This action started with the former editorial staff, and we understand that these posts are not intended to be monotonic; provide no interaction, and to be centered on the author/ researcher’s speech. Instead, they are meant to foster polylogues, dialogues, interactions between the authors and the communities involved.

(c) to update the item on the website (about the journal) to include the interlocutors as outlined in the SciELO guidelines: “[...] the scientific and educational environment [and] different instances of society related to the journal’s topic” (SCIELO, 2020, p. 30).

(d) to segment interlocutors using DIRECTED COMMUNICATION: “towards researchers as potential authors, national and international users, or even potential readers, as well as related institutions as priority audiences of the actions”. In our field, we have young researchers; science educators, graduate students; editors and publishers of other journals in the field; senior researchers and evaluators. Outside our field, we have funders and development agencies; educational managers and programs for accessibility and social inclusion; young students from the Basic Education system; specific calls for underrepresented audiences in the academy.

(e) to strengthen not only the scientific, but also cultural, social, and economic relevance of the RBPEC. The role and social relevance of the journal do not translate this engagement in social media. In this scenario, we thought about analyzing the needs of the journal and its public to assess limitations and potentialities, focusing on each digital marketing scenario. To expand Web 2.0 tools (social media, platforms, indexers...). To engage the public, it is necessary to think about a regularity of the actions; to keep on interacting in media spaces to strengthen the journal’s brand; to make campaigns to get more reach, and to work around the relevance of the content with a view to mobilization and engagement of the communities.

We have countless challenges, but we will keep doing our best. We hope to count on everyone’s support, and this to be the first of other dialogues.

Finally, we need to address the fact that many currents of thought consider contemporaneity as the period of a knowledge society. We no longer base our economies exclusively on products and processes, but on the ability to know, innovate and produce information. Obscurantism is spread across many websites and blogs that dispute the territory of knowledge production with science. While they speak the language of young people, we still talk dinner dances. We “gotta get up” and modernize ourselves to learn to dialogue with youth and cultural matters, especially to ensure the prosperity of science.

It is a matter of life or death for scientific knowledge. Wars are being fought in social networks, in information technology, in the information or disinformation of peoples. We need to humanize science, but also sharpen our communication tools. This is how we feel: ready for a confrontation, sharpening our girl’s nails, sharpening the journal, so that we can allow more people and the oppressed to be heard to ensure that the flame of knowledge remains alive in every citizen.

References

Caribé, R. C. V (2015). Comunicação científica: reflexões sobre o conceito. Informação & Sociedade: Estudos, 25(3), 89–104. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11959/brapci/93078

Silva, P. C, & Silva, M. (2012). Em busca de um conceito de comunicação. Revista Latinoamericana de ciencias de la comunicación, 9(16), 26–35. http://revista.pubalaic.org/index.php/alaic/article/view/470/271

Notes