CONCYTEC: Fostering and assessing science, technology and innovation in Peru

Abstract

What motivated the organization of the Hatun Tinkuy Peru [1] event, the great gathering for scientific research and production? When I started working at the Peruvian National Council of Science, Technology and Technological Innovation (CONCYTEC, original Spanish-language acronym) [2], I was given the main task of assessing the platform where national researchers’ CVs are registered, which was called the National Directory of Researchers and Innovators. We did that in 2017 and we then planned a new project, the Peruvian Current Research Information System (PeruCRIS), of which wewill talk about more in detail later. In 2018, we noticed that our national repository, Open Access to Scientific Information for Innovation (ALICIA) [3], which harvests records from other repositories, had some issues, which led us to start some projects for improving the metadata from our researchers’, research and of some repositories; these projects are still ongoing. I also noticed that Peruvian journals had several challenges. CONCYTEC is Latindex’s collection center in Peru and it also manages the SciELO Peru website [4]. Well, it turned out that Peruvian journals lacked promotion and so I met with a group of journal editing and bibliometric analysis experts to tell them that I wanted to improve our scientific communication capabilities because I noticed some other issues that prevented us from going further. That was when we came up with the idea of organizing a large conference, which would serve as an inspiration to everyone who currently edits or wants to edit journals; for everyone who knows how to do it also to share detailed knowledge on the technical and academic issues involved in the production of scientific journals. Moreover, we also wanted to invite the main companies involved as stakeholders: scientific information providers and publishers. That is howwe came up with this idea of the Hatun Tinkuy conference, which we held in 2019 [5]. I must confess that I am not an expert; I graduated as a computer engineer. I have previously published in some journals while I was studying my doctorate program, but I have never edited one. Therefore, to call the professionals is what should be done. We gathered with a large group of people to define guest speakers and topics and some colleagues from the CONCYTEC and from other Peruvian institutions advised us about the topics to be covered by the speakers; I wanted for open science to have a prominent space on the agenda. I also wanted to see how Latindex was used in other countries and so we had guest speakers from Costa Rica and Chile to tell us about it. I also wanted to have topics such as how to edit a journal and how to detect plagiarism. We held conferences and workshops