Submissions

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Author Guidelines

What we publish

brazilian science communications publishes original syntheses: peer-reviewed articles in which researchers set out the state of the art of a field investigated in Brazil.

A synthesis makes a claim about a body of research rather than about a single study. It does not report new experiments or new data, and it is not an exhaustive literature review.

Manuscripts whose citations concentrate on the authors' own publications are returned without review.

There is one article type and one template. Editors also commission syntheses.

Length

Maximum 4,000 words, including the abstract, the references and the table and figure captions.

Abstract

Maximum 150 words. State what the synthesis concludes: the finding, the disagreement and the gap.

The synthesis figure

Every article carries one figure: a photograph representing the field the synthesis covers.

Sources

We do not publish manuscripts whose argument depends on work published in venues without genuine peer review, without editorial oversight, or operating on volume rather than judgement.

Structure

See Anatomy of a synthesis for a section-by-section model. There is no rigid template.

Language

Articles are published in English.

Review and decisions

Manuscripts are read by an editor and, if they pass that assessment, sent to at least two reviewers. The full process, including timelines and how to appeal a decision, is described on the editorial process page.

Costs

Reading is free. There is no submission fee.

On acceptance, a charge of R$ 400 per article covers production costs.

In exceptional cases, justified and documented, exemption from the charge is granted at the discretion of the journal's administration.

Copyright

The content of articles is the sole responsibility of the author or authors, who declare themselves responsible for any third-party claim arising from copyright disputes, and who hold bsc harmless from any liability arising from their publications.

Authors retain copyright in the work and grant bsc the right of first publication.

Articles are published under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

Submission Preparation Checklist

All submissions must meet the following requirements.

  • This is a synthesis of a field — not a research article reporting new data, and not an exhaustive literature review.
  • The manuscript is no longer than 4,000 words, including references. There is no minimum.
  • The abstract is no longer than 150 words.
  • Every substantive claim is traceable to a cited source, and the references have been checked for accuracy and completeness.
  • Work that contradicts the synthesis is cited and addressed, not omitted.
  • The submission has not been published before and is not before another journal. A preprint does not count as prior publication; its DOI is declared.
  • All authors meet the authorship criteria and have approved this version.
  • Any use of generative AI is disclosed, naming the tool and what it was used for.
  • Competing interests and funding sources are declared.
  • Permission has been obtained for any third-party figures, photographs or datasets, under terms compatible with CC BY 4.0.

Copyright Notice

Authors retain copyright in their work. They do not transfer ownership to the journal.

By submitting, authors grant brazilian science communications a non-exclusive licence to publish the article and to identify itself as the original publisher.

Articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). Anyone may read, copy, distribute, translate, mine and build upon the article, including for commercial purposes, provided the authors and this journal are credited and any changes are indicated.

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any third-party material — figures, photographs, tables, long quotations — under terms compatible with CC BY 4.0, and for supplying the credit line the rights holder requires.

By submitting, the corresponding author confirms that every author has agreed to these terms.

Privacy Statement

This statement explains what we do with the personal data of the people who read, write for and review for this journal. It is written to be read, not to be survived: if anything here is unclear, write to us and we will explain it and fix the wording.

What we collect, and why

Readers. You can read everything we publish without an account. If you create one to receive alerts, we keep your name, email and any interests you tell us about, and we use them for nothing except sending what you asked for. Our server records the usual technical data — address, browser, pages requested — which we use in aggregate to count how often articles are read and to keep the site working.

Authors. When you propose or submit, we collect the names, affiliations, emails and ORCID identifiers of everyone credited, plus the manuscript and correspondence about it. We need this to run the editorial process and to publish the article. If your article is published, the names, affiliations and ORCID identifiers of the authors become part of the permanent scholarly record.

Reviewers. We keep your name, email, affiliation and areas of expertise so we can invite you appropriately, and we keep your reports as part of the record of the decision. Your identity as a reviewer is not disclosed to authors unless you choose to sign your report.

What we do not do

We do not sell, rent or trade personal data. We do not run advertising, and we do not host third-party advertising trackers. We do not use your data to train machine-learning models, and we do not sell reviewer or author lists to anyone.

Who else sees it

Editors and reviewers involved in handling your manuscript see what they need to handle it. Beyond that, data reaches only the services that make the journal work: the hosting and content-delivery provider that serves this site, the system that registers DOIs, and the indexing services to which published metadata is deliberately sent (that is the point of publishing). Where we are legally compelled to disclose data, we will do so, and we will tell you unless the law forbids it.

How long we keep it

Editorial records — submissions, decisions, reviews, correspondence — are kept indefinitely, because the integrity of the scholarly record depends on being able to reconstruct how a decision was made. Accounts that are never used are deleted after five years of inactivity. Published articles are permanent by design: an article, once published, is part of the record and cannot be unpublished on request. Corrections and retractions are published openly and linked to the original.

Your rights

Under Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (LGPD, Law 13.709/2018) you may ask us to confirm what data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or provide it in portable form; you may also withdraw consent for anything you consented to, such as alerts. We honour the equivalent rights of authors and reviewers based elsewhere, including under the GDPR, without asking where you live.

Two limits are honest to state up front: we cannot delete the authorship of a published article, and we cannot delete the record of an editorial decision. Everything else we can and will remove on request.

Security

The site runs over encrypted connections; passwords are stored hashed and are never visible to us. We keep the software patched. We will not pretend this is a guarantee: if a breach affects your data, we will tell you and the relevant authority, and we will say what happened rather than issue a statement about how seriously we take security.

Contact

For anything on this page — a request, a correction, a complaint — write to the editors. We answer data requests within 15 days, the period the LGPD sets.

This statement applies to this journal’s website. It does not cover sites we link to, which have their own policies.