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‘Invest in electronic journal resources,' DOST urges CHED

Monday, September 07, 2020 12:29 AM    Views : 824by:Jeffrey Damicog

The Department of Science and Technology (DOST) on Friday, Sept. 4, urged the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) to invest in electronic journal resources so that researchers in the country’s higher learning institutions (HEIs) could keep up with the latest global developments.

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MANILA BULLETIN FILE

DOST Undersecretary for Research and Development Dr. Rowena Cristina Guevarra pointed this out considering that the Philippines has now ranked 50th among 131 economies in the Global Innovation Index (GII), a big leap from its 73rd ranking in 2017.

“Undersecretary Guevara wishes that all HEIs in the country would have access to electronic scientific journal resource(s),” the DOST said in a statement.

“It is her hope that the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) will consider investing on this resource to level the R&D (research and development) playing field for HEIs in the country,” it urged.

The GII, which measures a country’s performance in fostering innovation, is based on a number of indicators such as R&D investments, international patent and trademark applications, including the more recent indicators such as mobile-phone application creation and high-tech exports.

For its part, the DOST also announced that it has renewed its subscription with Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher of peer-reviewed journals and articles.

Guevara said this is in line with DOST’s campaign “R&D – Making Change Happen” as it allows researchers to gain access to more than 3,000 journals and 25 million research articles across 26 subject areas and citation index database with over 5, 000 publishers and about 76 million articles.

“It is our hope that by providing access to these scientific journals, we (shall) enrich the knowledge base of our researchers and see the current trends in research and development around the world. We believe that this subscription will entice more researches in the Philippines,” she said.

This access is open to all personnel of the 35 DOST attached agencies, project leaders of DOST and its Councils’ funded researches, including HEIs in the regions that previously did not have access to these scientific journals.

“To date, about 200 universities including a few secondary schools and regional government agencies nationwide benefitted in this partnership,” the DOST cited.

“The access to the said journals/articles and citation index database was also a big help to DOST in identifying priority research areas, exploring possible research initiatives, and in the evaluation of proposals submitted for DOST/Council GIA (Grants In-Aid) funding,” it added.

Since the partnership with DOST began in 2018, Elsevier reported that “the Philippines posted an average increase of 10.4 per cent in terms of the year-on-year published articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. ”

“From 2017-2020 the Philippines’ research output also reached an average of 4,358 articles per year; in the year 2019 (it) posted the highest research output in a single year at 5,614 research publications produced,” the DOST.

“More so, the quality of these articles is 15 per cent above the global average with reference to its CiteScore metric, which is about an average of 4 citations per publication. It was further reported that 42 per cent of these articles were conducted in collaboration with international research institutions,” it added.

 

Source: Manila Bulletin Website

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