O debate promovido pela CCTCI da Câmara dos Deputados será realizado na próxima quarta-feira, 7 de novembro

A Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência (SBPC) convida todas as entidades científicas e acadêmicas do País  a participarem da audiência pública na próxima quarta-feira, 07 de novembro, que discutirá “A situação econômica da área de ciência e tecnologia e a crise das universidades brasileiras”. O debate será realizado pela Comissão de Ciência e Tecnologia, Comunicação e Informática (CCTCI) da Câmara dos Deputados, às 9h30, no Anexo II do Plenário 13, em Brasília.

Além da participação do presidente da SBPC, Ildeu de Castro Moreira, o debate contará com a presença dos presidentes da Academia Brasileira de Ciências (ABC), Luiz Davidovich, da Financiadora de Inovação e Pesquisa (Finep), Marcos Cintra, do Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), Mário Neto Borges, da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Capes), Abilio Baeta Neves, da Associação Nacional dos Dirigentes das Instituições Federais de Ensino Superior (Andifes), Reinaldo Centoducatte, da Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz), Nísia Trindade Lima, e da Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (Embrapa), Sebastião Barbosa.

Jornal da Ciência

The post SBPC convida todas as entidades científicas a participarem de audiência pública sobre a situação econômica da C&T e das universidades brasileiras appeared first on Jornal da Ciência.

A reader writes:

I’m new to the job market (I went straight from college to law school and only just graduated this spring), and it’s going pretty well so far, but there’s one thing I’ve gotten conflicting information about/reactions to.

I don’t put hobbies on my resume, but they have come up in some of my interviews. I’ve been advised by career services and my parents to mention hobbies that speak to my career/personality in some way (for example, being an avid runner might indicate dedication despite hardship, or skydiving might show risk-taking).

My problem is, I’m a homebody, and my hobbies are honestly kind of boring. I knit, I bake, I read, I watch Netflix, I spend time with my significant other … and that’s about it. I do put effort into my crafty hobbies (I like teaching myself new knitting techniques or recipes), but they’re not particularly unique or interesting, nor am I an expert in them by any means. I’m afraid of giving the impression that I’m a grandma trapped in a 20-something’s body. Am I overthinking this and should just be honest about my hobbies when I’m asked about them? Should I try to put some sort of career-ish spin on them when asked?

The thing with hobbies, when they come up in interviews, is that they’re very unlikely to get you rejected (assuming they’re not, like, binge drinking or B&E’s). Occasionally they’re a plus, but more often then not, they’re a neutral.

The times when they’re a plus are when they spark rapport with your interviewer (“You forage for wild mushrooms? So do I!”), make you more interesting or memorable in some way (although I tend to think that’s overrated; if you’re a strong candidate, it’s better to be remembered for … being a strong candidate), or, as you said, reinforce something positive about you (dedication, resilience, interest in helping others, etc.).

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to try to figure out which hobbies might do one of those things, because it will vary from interviewer to interviewer. One interviewer might love seeing that you run marathons, while the next couldn’t care less but would be thrilled to hear you read a book a week.

So I would answer honestly if you’re asked about how you spend your time outside of work, and don’t worry about trying to find a way to put a career-ish spin on it.

That said, I think you can and should flesh out your answer beyond just something like “I like to read” — to give a little more information and give your interviewer something to react to. For example: “I’m a big reader. I’ve recently been on an Indian literature kick, and I’ve been reading Jhumpa Lahiri and Khushwant Singh.” Or, “I love baking, and I try to experiment with at least one new recipe a week. Some of them are disasters, but it’s a fun way to use a different part of my brain than I use at work.” Or whatever — the idea is just to show you can carry on a pleasant conversation.

In fact, much of the time, interviewers don’t really care what your hobbies are; they just want to see if you can make pleasant small talk about a topic that’s comfortable for you. So you’ll answer this better if you look at the question as an attempt to engage you in conversation and learn a bit more about who you are, rather than as an attempt to divine who you really are as a professional.

how do I tell an interviewer about my hobbies when my hobbies are kind of boring? was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

Latin America has created and maintains a non-commercial infrastructure where scientific publications belong to the academic community and not to large publishers, and where the nature of publication is conceived as the act of making research publicly available and not as part of a commercial industry.

Each academic institution is part of an informal cooperative that finances journals with help from its faculty and publishes them in Open Access (OA), which means that everybody benefits from each other’s investment. This modus operandi has been successful for Latin America—even before the Open Access initiative got its official name from Budapest.

Redalyc is part of the regional OA ecosystem in Latin America that provides—for free— lots of complementary capabilities to journals that, in other parts of the world, are services supplied by commercial publishers. In this sense, Redalyc has offered, since 2003, journal evaluation and editorial professionalization to improve quality in publications, as well as technology aimed to increase visibility, interoperability and discoverability. More recently, it has published journals on the Semantic Web with structured content and enriched file formats like XML, ePUB, HTML5, or PDF to improve the accessibility and readability of scientific material. Today, Redalyc’s collection consists of more than half a million full-text articles from 1,300 journals published by 622 publisher institutions from 22 countries with more than 1.5 million authors.

Within the past 15 years, we have witnessed a substantial decline in the academic and open nature of this environment, where new contracts between commercial publishers and institutions have shifted funds away from institutions and weakened internal editorial teams. Many scientific evaluation systems—at national and institutional levels—were also transformed. Instead of assessing publications and researchers with custom strategies, institutions and national evaluation systems began adopting the Impact Factor (IF) from Web of Science and Scientific Journal Rankings (SJR) from Scopus as the only valid metrics.

Research assessment policies like these are harmful to science locally and to Open Access initiatives. The decision to publish an OA journal relies on the editor and the benefits they receive. There is no incentive to be OA or to be indexed by OA platforms like Redalyc, as journals budgets are constrained by the participation in Web of Science or Scopus.

DORA recommends that publishers “Greatly reduce emphasis on the journal impact factor as a promotional tool, ideally by ceasing to promote the impact factor or by presenting the metric in the context of a variety of journal-based metrics.” At Redalyc, we share DORA’s vision. We believe that to accelerate meaningful change, journals and publishing platforms should lead by example.

Many journals play a significant role in regional academic communication in Latin America. The research they publish has profound societal impacts that improve the quality of life in the local community. We fear these journals are at risk of disappearing, because their sustainability increasingly relies on where they are ranked within Web of Science or Scopus.

For that reason, Redalyc made an important decision: to add one more mandatory element to our criteria for a journal’s evaluation that explicitly requires signing DORA.

For Redalyc, it is important to value a journal based on its content rather than basing its impact only on citations; it is crucial that research results are assessed by their own merits and not by where they are published. We highly value publications that address local challenges, particularly in the social sciences and humanities.

We recognize —as a society—that access to research is not enough, it is necessary to think about sustainability to guarantee that science continues to be open, is evaluated fairly, and remains in the hands of the research community.

As a result of this strategy, we have received a great response! In a few days, more than 200 journal editors from Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and more have signed DORA, and we received a positive reaction from the community. We thank all journal editors for being a key part of this process. We are confident that together we will continue strengthening Open Access and scholarly journals integrated to global science but in a non-subordinate way.

For more information about #RedalycSuppportsDORA please read the press release here.

Arianna Becerril-Garcia, PhD, is the Executive Director of Redalyc and a Professor at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico.

Guest blog posts reflect the opinions of the authors and not necessarily those of DORA.

A SBPC é uma das seis entidades científicas do País que terá um representante no Comitê. A medida foi publicada nessa quinta-feira, 4 de outubro, no Diário Oficial da União

O ministro Gilberto Kassab assinou nessa terça-feira, 2 de outubro,  a portaria No. 5.107, que cria o Comitê de Popularização da Ciência e Tecnologia (CPCT), cuja atribuição é “assessorar o Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovações e Comunicações (MCTIC) na formulação de políticas e na avaliação de projetos e programas relativos à Política Nacional de Popularização da Ciência e Tecnologia”.  A medida foi publicada no Diário Oficial da União (DOU) desta quinta-feira, 4 de outubro.

Presidido pelo ministro do MCTIC, o Comitê será coordenado pelo secretário de Políticas e Programas de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento do Ministério (Seped), ao qual é vinculado, e terá, em sua composição, representantes de entidades e ligadas à ciência e à educação cientifica do País: Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência (SBPC); Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq); Associação Brasileira de Centros e Museus de Ciência (ABCMC); Fórum dos Coordenadores de Feiras e Mostras de Ciências; Fórum Nacional de Olimpíadas Científicas; além de um representante de notório conhecimento e reconhecida atuação da área de Eventos de Popularização da Ciência.

“Para a SBPC, é uma iniciativa importante a criação de um comitê para colaborar com o MCTIC na formulação e coordenação de planos e ações para a popularização da ciência no Brasil. Isso pode ajudar na definição de políticas mais gerais para esta área, no acompanhamento dos planos e programas de ação e na mobilização dos setores ligados à CT&I e educação para as atividades de popularização. Ações como a Semana Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia, as feiras e olimpíadas de ciência, a criação e manutenção de centros e museus de ciência, os editais para divulgação científica, bem como a presença da ciência e tecnologia nas redes sociais – todos eles instrumentos importantes dessa política – poderão ser discutidos e planejados de forma mais integrada”, comenta o presidente da SBPC, Ildeu de Castro Moreira.

Além de discutir ações e estratégias para a Política Nacional de Popularização da Ciência e Tecnologia, o CPCT deverá também propor normas e diretrizes de atuação do MCTIC;  assessorar a SEPED;  identificar necessidades da área e colaborar na elaboração de documentos de técnicos e de referência e planos plurianuais de ações; acompanhar as atividades de interesse para a Popularização da Ciência e Tecnologia em foros deliberativos e instâncias administrativas, nacionais e internacionais; mobilizar setores do governo e da sociedade civil para consecução das ações de interesse da área; atuar junto ao Governo Federal para captação de recursos e fortalecimento da área em âmbito nacional; acompanhar, avaliar e garantir a execução dos compromissos firmados e das metas propostas em nível nacional; e avaliar, a cada 02 (dois) anos, os resultados das políticas de Popularização da Ciência e Tecnologia.

Segundo o presidente da SBPC, é importante também que o CPCT interaja fortemente com outros setores, como o Ministério da Educação, as FAPs (Fundações de Amparo à Pesquisa), as entidades cientificas, as universidades, as instituições de pesquisa, as escolas, os meios de comunicação, etc., pois são eles que executam e promovem a maioria das ações de popularização da ciência.

“A SBPC tem representação nesse comitê e certamente terá uma participação intensa nas discussões e proposições de políticas, planos e programas para aprimorar a divulgação e a popularização da ciência no País”, afirma Moreira.

Daniela Klebis – Jornal da Ciência

The post MCTIC cria Comitê de Popularização da Ciência e Tecnologia appeared first on Jornal da Ciência.

Antecipando-se ao relatório do IPCC, 40 cientistas alertam para risco de governos negligenciarem combate à mudança do clima MAURÍCIO TUFFANI, Editor – No próximo dia 8, segunda-feira, o Painel Intergovernamental de Mudanças Climáticas das Nações Unidas (IPCC), deverá lançar seu relatório especial mostrando a situação de urgência em que se encontra o mundo para conseguir...