Políticas de comunicación científicaestructura, evolución y prácticas de las revistas científicas

Resum

Scientific journals and the impact factor are curious objects, almost un-known in general by society, but, over the lasts seventy years, they have be-come the main channel to communicate science. In fact, in several countries promotion in academic and scientific careers more and more relies in the amount of published articles within high impact journals today. Therefore, the socially most relevant knowledge follows a distribution and visibility system that few people really understands.Although for a lay person this issue can sound strange, its dynamic is easy to explain. Scientific journals are different from those that people normally buy at a newsstand or read in the internet. Broadly speaking, a paper published in this kind of journals has gone through several quality control –peer and edi-torial reviews– carried out by experts in the subject who decide if that paper should be published or not. Thanks to these procedures, editorial teams look for the support of the rest of the scientific community to publish the best sci-entific material, or at least to avoid inappropriate, duplicate or fake papers. In brief, the publication process implies a series of quality control resting in the belief that the scientific community is able to autoregulate itself using several, open, common objective and articulated procedures of shared regulatory, in-spiring professional values...