About the Journal

brazilian science communications (bsc) publishes selected syntheses of Brazilian research.

Each Synthesis is a peer-reviewed article in which leading researchers distill the state of the art of a field investigated in Brazil — what is known, what is contested, and where the field is heading. A synthesis is original work, but its unit is the field, not the study. Where a research article reports what one group found, a synthesis states what a body of work — dozens or hundreds of papers, often by people who disagree with each other — now establishes. That claim belongs to no single paper, and formulating it is the original contribution. What a synthesis does not report is new experiments or new data. It is the map of them.

Our premise is simple. Brazil produces world-class science across an exceptional range of subjects — biodiversity, agriculture, energy, public health, climate, social policy — but that production is scattered across thousands of journals and is rarely visible as a whole. The journal exists to concentrate it: a single venue where the essential findings of Brazilian research are synthesized, in English, for the international scientific community that meets this research in scattered pieces, and for Brazilian researchers themselves, who are often the last to see the whole of what their own field has produced.

Selection is the journal’s core value. Authors submit finished articles; there is no proposal stage. Editors also commission syntheses directly, and every piece — submitted or commissioned — undergoes peer review. The journal is open access: reading is free, for everyone, everywhere. Publication is supported by a modest article processing charge (R$ 400 per published article). Articles are published in English and appear continuously, each one as soon as it is ready: there is no issue queue and no fixed calendar.

Why this journal exists

Brazilian graduate programmes produced 754,576 distinct articles between 2021 and 2024. Wherever that production can be measured, it is strong. About half of it — 382,045 articles — is ranked by Scopus or by the Journal Citation Reports, the two systems the rest of the world reads journals by; and nearly half of those, 47.6%, are in first-quartile journals. That is 181,790 articles, a quarter of everything the country produced.

A quarter of a national output sitting in the top quartile of world science is not a peripheral achievement, and it spans an exceptional range: biodiversity, tropical agriculture, arboviruses, renewable grids, public health, climate. The half that cannot be measured is not the weak half either — nearly six in ten of these articles are written in Portuguese, and of the production no international index reaches at all, more than nine in ten are. Brazilian journals carry something close to half the national output. What that half lacks is not quality; it is readers. Read individually, each article is a contribution. Read together, they would be a map of what a continental country knows about biodiversity, tropical agriculture, arboviruses, renewable energy and much else. That map is not being drawn, because no venue exists whose job is to draw it.

That is the gap this journal was created to fill. Not to compete with the journals where Brazilian research is published — they are doing their work — but to synthesize what that research, taken as a whole, now establishes. The syntheses are written by the researchers themselves, in English, so that the map is legible where the audience is.

Open access

Everything brazilian science communications publishes is free to read, from the moment it is published, with no embargo, no subscription and no registration.

Licence

Articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). Anyone may read, download, copy, distribute, translate, mine and build upon them, including commercially, provided the authors and the original publication are credited.

Authors retain copyright of their work, granting brazilian science communications the right of first publication.

Preservation

Content is preserved in the PKP Preservation Network, an independent archive. If the journal ceases to publish, the articles remain available.

Editorial process

This page describes what happens to a manuscript from the moment it arrives until it is published or declined. It applies equally to submitted and commissioned syntheses.

The steps

  1. The author submits a manuscript and receives a tracking number.
  2. The Editor-in-Chief assesses it and assigns an Associate Editor whose field is closest to the subject.
  3. The Associate Editor decides whether to send the manuscript for review. If not, the author is told directly and promptly.
  4. The Associate Editor invites reviewers and the author is notified that review has begun.
  5. Reviewers submit their reports.
  6. The Associate Editor makes the decision, in consultation with the Editor-in-Chief when the reports disagree.
  7. The author receives the decision with the full reports.

Initial assessment

Every manuscript is read by an editor before any decision. The first question is not quality but fit: is this a synthesis of a field, or is it a research article, a literature review, or an essay? A manuscript that reports new data, or that catalogues the literature without stating what it establishes, is declined at this stage regardless of its merit — it belongs in a different journal, and saying so in a week is more useful to the author than saying it in three months.

The second question is whether the field is one where Brazilian research leads or is indispensable. This is the journal's scope, and it is applied strictly.

Manuscripts declined without review receive a written reason. We do not send form letters.

Formatting at submission

Manuscripts do not need to follow our formatting requirements at initial submission. Any legible format is accepted, provided the text, references and figures are complete. Formatting matters only at acceptance.

What we do ask for at submission: the abstract within the stated limit, the references complete enough to be checked, and — if the synthesis rests on a defined body of literature — a note on how that body was assembled.

Commissioned syntheses

Editors commission syntheses directly. A commission is an invitation to submit, not an acceptance: commissioned manuscripts go through the same review and can be declined. Authors are told this when invited.

Decisions

Four outcomes are possible: accept, minor revision, major revision, decline. There is no fifth category and no indefinite hold.

A request for major revision is not a soft rejection. It means the editors believe the synthesis should exist and that the reports say what has to change for it to be publishable.

Authors who disagree with a decision may appeal once, in writing, to the Editor-in-Chief. An appeal must respond to the substance of the reports. It is read by an editor who did not handle the original decision.

Time

We commit to these targets and publish our performance against them:

  • First decision: twenty days from submission. This is the editorial assessment — whether the manuscript goes to review or is declined.
  • Peer review: sixty days from the start of review to the decision.
  • Publication: ten days from acceptance.

A manuscript that goes through the full process therefore has a decision in about eighty days and appears ten days later.

When a target is going to be missed, the corresponding author is told before the deadline passes, with the reason.

After acceptance

Accepted manuscripts are copy-edited, typeset and marked up in JATS XML. Authors approve the PDF version before publication. Articles are published continuously as they are ready — there is no queue waiting for an issue to fill.

Each article receives a DOI and is deposited with Crossref on publication.