Marketing científico digital e a divulgação da ciência: o papel dos portais de periódicos da América Latina e do Caribe

Abstract

Scientific digital marketing is a strategy that requires planning and decision making from digital journal libraries in order to maximize the visibility and dissemination of science to the scientific community and to society in general. Digital libraries are online platforms dedicated to the management of scientific journals of institutions. The main objective of this research was to investigate the strategies and practices of scientific digital marketing pointed out by the scientific literature and by the normative documents of the free and open-access digital journal libraries belonging to public universities in Latin America and the Caribbean. The methodology is characterized as basic research, with exploratory and descriptive objectives. The methodological procedures were carried out in six stages: bibliographical survey of the theoretical basis of the study; mapping of Latin American and Caribbean digital journal libraries; systematic review of the scientific literature in order to analyze trends in scientific communication; development of the data-collection instrument based on the bibliography used; and data collection and treatment. The systematic analysis of the literature showed evidence of strategic scientific marketing actions, such as: the video, audio, image and social web media resources; the tools, which are video summaries, audio podcasts and social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube); and the science comics. The normative documents (considering the thematic axes of a proposal for a scientific marketing plan, such as: visibility, digital presence, science dissemination, public, evaluation and control) showed evidence of strategic actions focused more on visibility of science, such as databases indexing, as well as actions aimed at improving the metrics and quality indicators and the training and qualification of the editors — these being the target audience of the libraries' actions. It was noted that the presence of digital journal libraries on the social web is still low and that normative documents practically do not address actions aimed at maximizing the presence of journals and researchers in this sphere. The literature presents some possibilities of actions and tools to increase the scientific communication in a more interactive and dynamic way, but it seems that most of the digital libraries have not yet adhered to other media trends, except for social media pages. In general, the results indicate that the dissemination of scientific information and the digital presence of these libraries are limited to their websites. In this sense, the challenge of the digital journal libraries is to act strategically in order to increase the visibility and dissemination of science, by presenting themselves as a source of reliable information and therefore contributing to the fight against scientific denialism.