Nowadays, the scientific-technical information had marked the course for its new and updates spreading in different branches of learning, in turns, the most of scientific advances use specialized journals and the most reliable distribution in order to give path to discoveries (Gretchenko et al. 2018Gretchenko, A.I., Nikitskaya, E.F., Valishvili, M.A. & Gretchenko, A.A. 2018. "Role of higher education institutions in developing hr potential in a forming innovation economy". Revista Espacios, 39 (21): 1-13, ISSN: 0798 1015.). However, before the Open Science appears, the discoveries were discussed in close spaces or used journals of prestigious recognition, with little access to researchers from developing countries (Abadal 2021Abadal, E. 2021. "Ciencia abierta: un modelo con piezas por encajar". Arbor, 197(799): a588-a588, ISSN: 0210-1963. https://doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2021.799003.).
In the XXI century, the Open Science, had facilitated the collaboration, research and the exchange of scientific information between scientifics, professors and enterprises, which allow integral solutions to the present problems of society. In addition, the Non Commercial Open Science is a tool which allows the acquisition of directly scientific information and without restrictions in any moment (Hicks 2021Hicks, D.J. 2021. "Open science, the replication crisis, and environmental public health". Accountability in Research, 17: 1-29, ISSN: 0898-9621. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2021.1962713.). According to UNESCO the “open science” should be turn into a world alliance of academic exchange with agreements with enterprises, educational, scientific centers and the whole society, in order to promote creation, evaluation and communication of scientific knowledge (Placeres et al. 2022Placeres, G.M., Reinaldo, L.A.A. & Rivero, M.O.M. 2022. "Revisión de las prácticas de Ciencia Abierta en América Latina y el Caribe". Revista cubana de transformación digital, 3(1): e159, ISSN: 2708-3411.).
Likewise, the English term “Publish or Perish”-had marked the course of scientific publications nowadays, as well as the way of knowing the hard way from the beginning of a research up to a scientific publication (van Dalen 2021van Dalen, H.P. 2021. "How the publish-or-perish principle divides a science: The case of economists". Scientometrics, 126(2), 1675-1694 ISSN: 0138-9130. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03786-x. ). Anyway scientific publications are use to evaluate the scientific status of professionals (mainly university professors and researchers) and as one the indicators to make the world ranking of universities. In addition is an indicator to opt to international projects, create scientific networks, and to be admitted in any job and prestigious PhD and post-doctoral programs studies (Prannckuté 2021Pranckuté, R. 2021. "Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World". Publications, 9(1): 1-59, ISSN: 2304-6775. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9010012. ).
United States was the leader of scientific publications, supported by excellent international work-teams, universities, institutes, infrastructure, high budget, relation with enterprises and the best journals of the world in all knowledge spheres. The EE.UU budget for Research and Development represents about 2.74 % of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), being the highest of the world.
However, in 2016 according to Nature journal, China became the world leader of scientific publications, in that year published 426,165 scientific papers, with an expenditure of 408,829 million dollars, which represented 2.07 % of GDP. However, the agricultural science publications only represented the 2.2 % (9,376 papers), the majority publications were the engineering (28.9 %) (Tellefson 2018Tollefson, J. 2018. "China declared world’s largest producer of scientific articles". Nature, 553(7689): 390-391, ISSN: 0028-0836. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-00927-4. ). It is important to highlight, that the countries who spend more in Research and Development are in turn the countries with the best universities and institutes in the world ranking and have the highest number of scientific publications (Freimane and Balina 2016Freimane, R. & Bāliņa, S. 2016. "Research and development expenditures and economic growth in the EU: A panel data analysis". Economics and Business, 29(1): 5-11, ISSN: 1407-7337. https://doi.org/10.1515/eb-2016-0016.).
The success of China is in the formation of professionals in other countries, in the creation of work teams specialized in several topics and in the monetary stimulation of professionals. A report publish on 2015 refers that from 1978 a total of 4.04 millions of Chinese students had studied abroad, and the 54.46 % of them had returned to work in institutes and universities. The most popular destiny is EE.UU, Canada, European Union and Australia (Curtis and Edouard 2022Curtis, P. & Edouard, V. 2022. "A semi-systemic Review of Historical Motives for Chinese Student Enrollment in Western Tertiary Level Educational Institutions". Thai Journal of East Asian Studies, 26(1): 108-127, ISSN: 2774-1125.).
On the other hand, in Latin American, the budget for Research and Development are low, with the exception of Brazil (12 of ranking), Mexico (24 of ranking), Argentina (35 of ranking) and Colombia (54 of Ranking). According to the World Bank (2018)Banco Mundial. 2018. Gasto en investigación y desarrollo (% del PIB). https://datos.bancomundial.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS the budget for the Central American countries is between 0.04 to 0.42 % of the GDP, being Costa Rica the most spend country in this area. This low budget and the limited access to international databases compromise the generation of scientific researchers that can be published in the best journals of the world.
“Boom” of Open Access journals
⌅Although, nowadays with the “boom” of the Open Access (OA) journals, many prestigious journals had changes to this new modality, in order to increase readers and citations and because of the boom of the Russian site Sci-Hub which steals scientific publications from prestigious publishing company like Elsevier and Springer. According to Science journal, this pirate reserve (Sci-Hub) around 80 millions of scientific papers, being EE.UU the fifth country in downloads (Bohannon 2016Bohannon, J. 2016. "The frustrated science student behind Sci-Hub". Science, 352(6285): 511, ISSN: 0036-8075. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.352.6285.511. ).This caused worth millions losses to the publishing companies and they had been forced to change to OA, although this favors the access to literatures of interest, the costs per publications are high between 1000 and 3500 dollars, being prohibitive prices for many Latin American countries. As peculiarity, in Brazil the best journals in livestock sciences have sending cost (25-100 USD) and for publication per edited page (25 to 50 USD).
On the other hand, due to the need of professionals to publish its results, many of them use spurious and predator publishers (predatory publishers), the characteristics of these journals is a false check in pairs, high publication costs and OA. Other researchers considered the journals as a way to spread scientific studies and they are not accepts responsibility for the content published. Many universities and institutes do not consider the evaluation of professionals in these publications, because they discredit the institutions renown (Beall 2012Beall, J. 2012. "Predatory publishers are corrupting open access". Nature, 480(7415): 179, ISSN: 0028-0836. https://doi.org/10.1038/489179a.).
Impact Factor of Latin American Journals
⌅The great interest of professors and researchers is to publish their scientific papers in journals indexed in the Web of Science (Web of Science https://mjl.clarivate.com/), which are the most visible journals (24749) in the world and the ones taking into account to scale in the ranking. This is a service in scientific information line, provided by Clarivate Analytics (before, Thomson Reuters), integrated in ISI Web of Knowledge, WoK. It has a great database that determines the impact factor of scientific journals, although it also record books and some important congress.
To calculate the Impact Factor (IF) of a journal is taking into account the number of citations (A) and the number of published papers for two years (B); IF=A/B. News, correspondence, errata and letter to the editor are excluded. This means that many journals championed for decrease the number of publications and to select the most prominent to increase the number of citations and the IF. In this sense, Ca-A Cancer Journal For Clinicians (https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15424863) in 2019 had an amazing impact factor of 508.702, with 33 published papers, 55868 citations and a rejection index of 95 %, placing it the first at worldwide. In general, the journals dedicated to health, engineers and basic sciences sectors has the highest impact factors, due to papers quality, budget, number of researchers and journals for published (Vinkler 2004Vinkler, P. 2004. "Characterization of the impact of sets of scientific papers: The Garfield (impact) factor". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(5): 431-435, ISSN: 1550-8366. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.10391. ).
On the contrary, for livestock sciences the journals had a low IF, although in the last decade it has been increased. In the 2019 ranking in the category “Agriculture, Dairy and Animal Science” top 10, the IF range between 2.322 to 6.091. This ranking is made up of 62 journals, where predominates the journals related with poultry (7), ruminants (5) and animal reproduction (3). Likewise, the American journals controls the ranking, although for the first time two Chinese journals were placed in the top 10, and the publishing company Elsevier in the most visible. Latin American has few journals in this category, with the exception of Brazil (2), Colombia (2) and Mexico (1), coinciding with the Latin American countries that most contributes to Research and Development.
A frequent question is if ¿the Latin American researchers can publish in that selected journals?, taking into account that the livestock sectors has few fund for researchers, less number of researchers and few journals indexed in the WoS. Many Latin American can published their researchers in that journals, although will depends on the budget, be expert in English language, work in teams, reach and novelty of researchers. Many researchers are associated to well known scientifics with editorial and referee experience and with some scientific papers in the topic. In this sense Rodriguez-Navarro (2011)Rodríguez-Navarro, A. 2011. "A simple index for the high-citation tail of citation distribution to quantify research performance in countries and institutions". PLoS One, 6(5): e20510, ISSN: 1932-6203. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0020510. estimate that only the 20 % of researchers in developing countries are able to publish in these scientific journals without being associated with professionals from development countries.
On the other hand, the whished by the institutions is to diversify the subject matter and increase the number of publication per professor or researcher. A study in Spain found that the universities more ranked had the greatest relation of papers per professor. In general, in well-known universities, the number of publications depends on the professor’s categories; it is estimate that the professor should publish at least between 3 and 4 papers per year, preferably as corresponding author and the associated professors between 2 and 3 papers per year (Samaniego et al. 2014Samaniego, G. 2014. "Presencia en la Web 2.0 de las universidades en función del ranking Webometrics". Didáctica, Innovación y Multimedia, 10(29):1-13, ISSN: 1699-3748. ). The impact publications should be associated to multidisciplinary work teams and pre and post graduate students.
H index revolution
⌅On the other hand, in 2005 the Argentinean physicist Jorge Hirsch, from California University, EE.UU revolutionized the scientific world with a formula to calculate the quality and productivity of researchers. According to Hirsch, a scientific has h index if the h of his Np papers receive at least h citations each, and the others (Np - h) papers has as maximum h citations each one (Hirsch 2005Hirsch, J.E. 2005. "An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output". Proceedings of the national Academy of Sciences, 102 (46): 16569-16572, ISSN: 0027-8424. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.050765510. ). It means that it is necessary to publish good papers frequently. Many scientific consider that the H index has been used to predict the Noble Prize (mainly in physics). As criticism, an author that publish review paper can have an H index equal or higher than an author who publish only scientific papers (Engqvist and Frommen 2008Engqvist, L. & Frommen, J.G. 2008. "The h-index and self-citations". Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 23(5): 250-252, ISSN: 0169-1125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2008.01.009. ), in that way many researchers groups publish between 2 and 3 review paper per year in excellent journals in order to increase the H index of the work team, since the review papers are very cited.
In addition, the author mentioned that, in physics, the H index should be in correspondence to the years dedicated to research, although in medical science this index seen to be higher (Thompson and Walker 2015Thompson, D.F. & Walker, C.K. 2015. "A descriptive and historical review of bibliometrics with applications to medical sciences". Phamacotherapy: The Journal of Human Pharmacology and Drug Therapy, 35(6): 551-559, ISSN: 1875-9114. https://doi.org/10.1002/phar.1586. ). For livestock science in Latin American, an H index between 10 and 15 is considered excellent. Many organizations calculate the H index in many ways, for example, Google Academic consider all the citations, including thesis, book, report among others, however, the Web of Science and Elsevier consider only the publications in journals indexed in each publishing company per each database.
The H index is an indisputable indicator to determine the visualization of publications, at least in the scientific sphere, the challenge of the Latin-American universities is to support the researchers, with budget for this area, relation with the industry, with the creation of work teams, access to the best databases, in the selection of scientific leaders to guide the researchers processes and to have an strategic plan well define about which researchers can create the highest impact at present and in the future.
The university students and postgraduate students are the principal media to spread knowledge and its socialization trough scientific papers that contributes to the solution of problems associated to livestock activity in Latin American. In addition, its insertion in the science promotes the formation and strengthening of formative research, which allow having an actual sight of the science. The previous, will also contributes to the visibility of scientific results in the best journals. The strengthening of this purpose is possible through the creation of work teams made up of professors, researchers, graduates and students with emphasis in practical and applied researchers, as part of the academic tasks of the institution.