Making Latin American science visible, and advances in cooling tech
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This is the Science Podcast for December 6, 2024. I'm Sarah Crespi. First up this week, freelance science writer Sofia Moutinho joins me to discuss making open access journals based in Latin America visible to the rest of the world. Next on the show, departing physical sciences editor Brett Krahulski discusses highlights from his career at science, particularly his work on the fast-growing area of cooling technologies.

Now we have Sofia Moutinho, a freelance science writer based in Brazil. This week in science, she wrote about how open access databases in Latin America are helping local journals keep science local while also reaching international audiences. Hi, Sofia. Welcome back to the Science Podcast. Hi, Sarah. It's very good to be back here. Yeah, right. So not only are these platforms promoting local science, but they are open access databases.

A lot of them are what you call the diamond model. Can you explain what that is? Yes, the diamond model, I think that putting it simply is basically a journal that doesn't charge authors to publish and doesn't charge readers to read as well. So it's totally free. There are no fees involved. So someone who might have trouble, you know, getting grants and also paying very high fees for publishing, sometimes thousands of dollars,

would be able to post their research and still get it peer reviewed and accessible to

other scientists in the same field or further abroad. Yeah, exactly. And this is what has been going on in Latin America like forever. Up to 90% of our journals, I say our because I'm Brazilian. So up to 90% of Latin American journals are Diamond and free to publish and free to read. So what we're actually talking about here is not the journals, but these platforms that

aggregate that content because it's really hard. And as someone who has kind of been involved in scholarly publishing since the 90s, but, you know, I remember you go to the library, you take down the big book, you copy off the things, maybe you scan it in and make a PDF or you

As a journal site started to pop up, you would navigate to each site. If you're lucky, PubMed would mention it, right? But it's not necessarily the case. You didn't really have an easy way to access these things. And everybody complained about the silos. Everybody complained about the inaccessibility of literature. As soon as the internet came up, they're like, why is it all the science here? And so this is what's happening with these small local science journals all over Latin America.

Yeah, so when these platforms were created in Latin America back in the end of the 90s, the idea was exactly to solve this visibility problem. So it's what we call like the invisible science of the global south, or in this case of Latin America, because we had all these journals published mainly by universities or scientific societies or specific research centers, and they were all scattered all around in libraries.

And as soon as the internet became popular, some researchers in Latin America independently had this idea of creating platforms to give visibility to the science that would be otherwise unseen. And they basically, what they do is that they are journals or repositories. So they gather different journals in one website where

where anyone can access and read them without the login, without the paywall. And the publishers, they can also use them as publishing tools. So they have access to the system and they can publish the journals within these platforms. Now, are there any requirements? You know, what do the journals have to do to ensure that they can get onto these platform repositories?

Yes, the requirements change quite a bit depending on each platform, but in general, they all require that the journals do peer review process, that they have like a regular publication of frequency, they also evaluate research quality and basic things like bibliographic good practice, like having a ORSEED number for the authors or having a DOI for each article from

Okay, so just to let people know, an ORCID number is a unique identifier for authors and a DUI is a unique identifier for articles. But, you know, we're talking about what these platforms have in common, but they also have some differences. There are also some differences between the platforms that reflect their ideology behind them. So, for example, Cielo is one of the first of its kind. It was created in 97 in Brazil.

And they have some requirements to push journals to be more international. So depending on the field of research, like if your journal is in the biology field, for example, Cielo requires that all the articles be published in English because the idea is that this science is not going to be in a ghetto in Latin America, but it will be read and it will be shared all over the world. So they push for English publishing.

And you have to have like a minimal percentage of international co-authors also. But on the other hand, some other platforms like Redalic, which is very popular among Spanish speaking countries in Latin America, they are like a big cheerleader of multilingualism. So they encourage journals to be published in their local languages and they see like this push for English as a form of colonization. So it's fascinating.

It's funny, like different platforms can have very different requirements. Right. These platforms make it easier for anyone to find the research and they're free. So it's easier to publish, too. There are some requirements that ensure the journals are rigorous. And on the other side, it's more expensive to publish in journals that are indexed in these Western platforms. Totally. Yeah. The Diamond Journalist.

journals in Latin America, they also serve this purpose that is very hard for a typical Latin American researcher to have the money to pay the high fees of international journals. So these journals and these platforms that host these journals, they are like an open door for scientists that are beginning their career and maybe don't have the grants they could use to pay these fees, for example.

I really like the point one of your sources made that, you know, basically, if you give a ton of money to rich countries to publish your research, you're taking the limited resources to fund science from these

lower income countries and giving it to rich countries to publish abroad. Yeah, that's really an issue here because science resources are historically scarce in Latin American countries as a whole. And we have problems with budget cuts and changes in governments that have different ideas of where to invest.

And this is always a problem for the local journals that struggle to have money to sustain themselves. But at the same time, many of the Latin American countries like Brazil, we allocate huge amounts of money to pay subscriptions for international journals and to pay article processing fees now in this era of open science. You know, so the open science movement was trying to do something good. That's what

many sources told me. But in the end, nowadays, the authors have to pay this bill themselves. And it's very hard when you come from a low-income country or developing country. Yeah. So, but there is this correlation between how pro-science your government may be and how sustainable this kind of model is for like publishing or sustaining these repositories. So that's a tricky question.

I wouldn't say there is a direct correlation because in many of these platforms, when you look at their history and the way they work, what I see is that they were created more as like the effort from individual researchers that wanted to give visibility to their visible science and wanted to make the science be seen by the world.

They went out and looked for resources and grants and ways of funding these platforms and their journals. And it's not necessarily a government policy, you know, in many countries, it's not.

It's not a budget item that the government's going to like suddenly cross out when it changes hands. No. Yeah. It's actually a problem sometimes when governments change and they do budget cuts that some of these journals, diamond journals, struggle to survive because they mostly publish by universities and depend on academic grants or public resources to function.

Yeah. So how have you seen this model expand outside the bounds of Latin America? Are there other places that are looking to make these aggregation sites so that their research is more visible on the international stage? Definitely. Like Cielo started in Brazil and in 97 already, Chile was one of the first countries to adopt.

But today is not only in Latin America. South Africa has adopted Cielo a few years ago as their official platform for researchers to upload their journals. And Redalic, this other platform, has conversations with UNESCO to expand to other African countries as well. So yeah, this is definitely something that other developing countries are looking at as a model for publishing.

Your story is part of a series that's coming out in the magazine about decolonizing science. How do you see this Diamond Open Access platforms in South America or Latin America fit with that theme? Yeah, I see...

many ways that these platforms would fit this subject. I think the first one is the economical issue. You know, it's hard for scientists from Latin America to have the money to publish in these mainstream journals. So platforms that value locally edited journals that are free to publish and free to read will be strengthening the local science.

It's also a matter of the topics of research, because mainstream international journals that often have a high impact factor and everyone wants to publish there, they might not necessarily give the same space for thematics and topics that are locally important for Latin American countries. So things like tropical diseases, like

Dengue, for example, may not be a fit for, I don't know, a generalist mainstream journal, but it will find a place in a locally edited journal. So it gives visibility to topics and subjects that are important for the local community.

for that local society and local research community. Do you think that this model should expand into the high-income countries? Like, do you see this as making sense, like coming into the U.S. or into Western Europe? That's a very hard question. And I asked many of my sources from Latin America and abroad, same question. And I think it's a

clash of views of how the publishing system works because here in Latin America, historically, it's been like this open access idea that science is a common good and has to be made free. But in other developing countries, since the beginning, it changed to be a commercial thing, to be a commercial activity for profit. So I think for this model from Latin America to be absorbed somehow by all

other more like richer countries, there would be a need to a shift in mentality, you know, that I don't know if it will happen or not. One of the things that you bring up in your story is sometimes researchers don't want to publish in these type of platforms. The issue with these platforms, because they are trying to give visibility to the science, they are making it affordable. But at the same time, many researchers would not publish

give priority to locally edited, non-commercial, open science journals when they have to choose where to publish their best research. This is a dilemma because most countries in the region, they evaluate their researchers based on metrics like citation or the impact factor of the journals where they publish.

And commercial journals, which are very expensive to publish in, they have higher citation numbers, higher impact factors. So like locally edited journals cannot compete with these international journals when you think about impact factor.

because they are not indexed in systems that give out this number, many of them. Many of them don't even have an impact factor or they are published in Spanish and they're not going to be indexed in Web of Science or Scopus, for example.

The evaluation systems of Latin American countries, which will determine whether a researcher will receive a grant or will get a promotion, they value more these commercial international journals because they value this kind of metrics of citation numbers.

So this creates a vicious circle where the top Latin American scientists will do their best to get money and grants to publish their best results. International journals looking for prestige, looking for academic opportunities, leaving locally edited journals as a second option. A lot of this is enmeshed. Promotion and grants and career advancement is connected to how journals are funded. Yeah.

And I talked to some researchers that are so fed up with the commercial published system. And they are telling me like, basically, I'm willing to commit

I know I'm not going to get more grants. I know I'm not going to advance in my career anymore because I will publish in this locally added open access journals and they don't have high impact factors and they're not as valued, but some of them are willing to do it anyway, just as a form of protest or rising awareness of the subject.

Thank you so much, Sofia. Thank you, Sarah. It was a pleasure to be here again. Yeah, good to have you. Sofia Moutinho is a freelance science writer based in Brazil. You can find a link to the story we discussed at science.org slash podcast. Stay tuned for our discussion with departing physical sciences editor Brett Groholski on all the cool ways to cool the world.

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Now we have Brent Groholski, a longtime physical sciences editor here at Science. He's leaving us soon and making his way to another journal. But before he goes, we're going to catch up and talk about some of the themes from his time here at Science. Hi, Brent. Welcome to the podcast. Hi, thanks for having me on. Sure. We do have kind of, we did kind of plan a key focus for our discussion. But before we go any further, I wanted to say, are there any anecdotes or highlights

Of your time here, I think I heard Jake, another physical science editor or deputy editor, say that you had to handle some fast-moving papers on earthquakes and volcanoes. Yeah, so obviously the natural hazard papers are sort of a special batch.

You want to get them out quickly. You want to get those top-tier, high-impact results through our process, our editorial process, as quickly as you can so we can get them out to the scientific community. There's a whole number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, Kilauea, the recent ones in Iceland, obviously the earthquake in Turkey, the doublet that happened two years ago.

All those ones have been really interesting to handle. And just to see the amazing disaster response in some of these cases is also really interesting. Yeah, you don't always think of earth science as fast moving, but it definitely can be.

So you focused a lot during your time handling physical papers on cooling technology during your time of science. What attracted you to this particular area? Because there are a million bazillion directions to go, and this is not what you did your PhD in. No, it is not what I did my PhD in. Yeah, I'm particularly interested in how we, you know, cool in part because of climate change and global warming.

It's pretty easy to see that as the planet increases in temperature, there's going to be more and more need to cool large spaces and also to cool small spaces. I mean, we're increasingly reliant on computing, which requires small-scale cooling to make sure those microchips are working at the right temperature. This just seemed to me like a topic area that was going to grow in interest and importance over the next decades. And so I really focused a lot on trying to encourage

good research in these topic areas involving all aspects of cooling. I handled a special issue back in 2020 that had a number of pieces on cooling technologies. And, you know, I've really enjoyed seeing the progress over the years and the sort of basic and applied research. Yeah, you pulled out Calorix as a specific example of that. And I think looking over it, I

reading the Wikipedia page to make sure I understand it. It is just science paper after science paper describing this technology and its advancements over the past decade or so. What drew you to that area? Why did you want to talk about it? The main place where we're going to really need to decrease the sort of energy footprint and also maybe think about moving on from vapor compression technology as cooling large spaces. That is a little bit more challenging because

because you do need to have systems that are reliable, that work for a long time. We should probably just take one second to talk about what caloric systems are or how caloric cooling works. So when I talk about caloric systems, we're talking about systems where we are driving a material through a phase transition with an external field in order to get that cooling effect. This could be an electric field, a magnetic field, a stress field.

And when you push it back and forth across a phase boundary, you get this cooling effect.

It's actually not that much different than vapor compression cooling. I was going to say, that's also, you know, you're changing something about its physical state at least, and you're getting that cooling effect. Yes. But there are big drawbacks to the vapor cooling. With the vapor compression cooling, there are some sort of fundamental limitations in how efficient the systems can be. The refrigerants that are being used, even the newer ones, have some global warming potential, and there's plenty of leaks in cooling systems.

Some of them end up being relatively complicated to maintain. That being said, it is a well-established technology, and I will give the industry a lot of credit for moving towards better refrigerants and more efficient systems. But the exciting thing about the potential for caloric cooling is

is that we'd be moving away from liquids and vapors, which has a lot of advantages when you think about, you know, you don't have to worry about a solid escaping the system, for instance, right? Right. If you pick the right solid systems as possible, they would actually last for longer than the vapor compression systems. And then inherently in some of these caloric systems,

they have a higher efficiency potential. And of course, the whole challenge is we're talking about developments in topic areas that are still pretty early on.

They don't have the sort of long history of development that vapor compression cooling has. And so we don't really know what caloric strategies may actually be competitive with vapor compression cooling. And what we're going to need, no matter what happens with new cooling technologies, is they have to be better in some way than the vapor compression systems that we have.

as those vapor compression systems improve incrementally over time. When you talk about large spaces, you're talking about buildings, right? Houses, like we have air conditioners, we have refrigerators. They use a ton of energy at the global level. It's only going to be more. What has been happening in the pages of science with respect to solid state cooling, which is another way of talking about caloric systems?

So in the pages of science, we have been mostly publishing research in two different areas of caloric cooling. Those are called elastocalorics and also electrocalorics. And the first part of that term before the caloric tells you what the field is that you're using to push something across the phase boundary. So in elastocaloric, you're sort of twisting it, pulling it, pushing it. And by doing that, you're pushing the material across the phase boundary where it then can absorb and release heat.

As you do that, you have to sort of shift how that heat is being transferred from the hot side to the cold side, right? So you always want to move stuff from hot to cold. How you time that shift across the phase boundary does that. Electrocalorics, you're using an electric field basically to do the same thing, to shift

a material across some sort of phase boundary that absorbs and releases heat. And then you engineer a system around that. So what are they needing to push on? Do they need to push on the efficiency, like how much energy you get in and how much

cooling you get out? One of the big things is that it's not that hard to show that you can get a system that cools pretty well in the lab. You can kind of show that you get metrics that are competitive with vapor compression cooling. And one of the big challenges is scaling up these systems so that they're actually commercially viable. And that's a long path. And we actually have a

So there's magnetocalorics, which is a third category. And that is a strategy where that path is much more well-trodden, let's say.

There's actually companies that are producing magnetocaloric coolers. They are often used in sort of very low temperature applications because it's one way to cool something that's already very cold. But it's just not quite gotten there on the commercial side. And it's starting to look less clear whether that's a viable path. And there's reasons for this. They tend to use pretty expensive materials. Magnets tend to be made out of like rare earth

These systems can be very heavy. It's not to say that one of these couldn't break through, but this is where you start talking about it looks very promising in the lab. And then 30 years later, it looks a lot less promising when you're trying to actually commercialize it. That's the way of it, though. Like if you follow solar, if you follow graphing, there's all kinds of detours that these technologies can take. And you just don't know in the early days, right? This is where it's important to pursue many strategies because you might have...

a breakthrough in how a system is engineered, and then you need to find a material that's going to optimize that. Or conversely, you might have a great material, but you need a breakthrough in how the system is designed. As I said, the good thing about this entire field is you have a very good benchmark that you need to get better than, and that's the vapor compression systems. A lot of times when we're talking about emerging technologies, they don't have that great benchmark with

quantifiable metrics that you're really targeting. And so in terms of where these electrocalorics and elastic caloric needs to go, it's kind of like everything. They need to sort of improve the fundamental properties. They also need to improve the system, but you know, they're making a lot of progress. Every time we get a new high profile paper, they're getting closer and closer to scaling up the system to be commercially viable. And they're showing that these sort of fundamental properties are getting better and better. That's really exciting.

for say 10 years down the line when these things might be actually competitive with vapor compression systems. Absolutely. Yeah, that's very cool. And I don't want to stop right away. I also wanted to just touch on passive radiative cooling. That's something that I really enjoy talking about for some reason and that you've overseen a ton of that at Science2. Can you just talk a little bit about what that is and how it fits in with this cooling the planet picture that we opened with?

Yeah, so there's two types of cooling. I'm going to even go a little bit broader than passive radiative cooling. So we have two ways of thinking about cooling. There's active cooling, which is what we're talking about, vapor compression. There's thermoelectrics. There's all sorts of ways you can actively cool something where you're applying a force to get the heat out.

Passive cooling strategies are exactly that. It's something that somehow cools without having to do anything. And there's two main ways to do this. There's evaporative cooling. So you can imagine just like pouring water on something and let it evaporate, that actually pulls heat out of the system. But then there's this piece of radiative cooling, which we have published quite a few papers on because it takes advantage of something that people don't really think about. For any cooling system, you have a hot source and you need a cold sink.

Passive radiative cooling relies on outer space as the cold sink. And so as long as your passive radiative cooling material is facing outer space, so if it's facing up, you basically can tailor the material. So infrared radiation, that's thermal radiation, goes through a very specific window in our atmosphere where it's not absorbed and pushes it into outer space. And you can cool things by several degrees this way. And it is part of an overall strategy to sort of help things at the margins

The sort of idea is that maybe if you had a passive radiative cooling paint, you could paint a building this, and that would on average cool the building down a little bit over the course of the year, which might not be that large of an energy savings over the course of a day or an hour, but you integrate it over a lot of buildings and over a lot of years. And that actually does make a real impact in terms of the amount of energy you need to cool the building. And of course, there's a lot of nuances in this discussion about how you do it and if it's

how stable the coatings are or the materials are. It's been a really interesting new direction to go in part because the sort of fundamental way this works has been known for a long time, but it just took some researchers some time to figure out how to do it in a way where it'd be really powerful. That happened about a decade ago and they've just been making improvements ever since. Yeah, it's been really interesting to follow that too. I think this has been, cooling is very cool. That's all I have to say.

It makes for good titles on your summaries. That's right. Really good little headlines. I mean, there's lots of things I could touch on. I mean, obviously, there's been a whole boom in thermoelectric cooling technologies, and this relies on the thermoelectric effect, which is a way to sort of use electricity to separate out, create a thermal gradient and

That's a field where there's been one material, bismuth telluride, that's been the main one that's been used for decades. And in the last, once again, about 10 years, there's been a boom of new materials. And once again, they are pretty far from being actually commercialized as they try to improve the metrics and also try to improve the engineering to make

commercially competitive cooling devices, but these would be really useful for smaller scale spaces. I've been really encouraged seeing the growth and development in thermoelectric coolers as well. I bought myself a thermoelectric wine fridge recently because they're quiet and

they're nice. They can't cool quite as much as a fridge or a freezer can, but you don't always need that sort of massive amount of cooling. And you don't have that drone in the back of the room, which makes me crazy. Yes. I think maybe getting rid of the drone might be the primary motivation to move on from vapor compression cooling. Absolutely. Every time it kicks off, I pick up my head. I don't know.

I think it's the audio person in me. All right, Brent. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate you taking the time and, you know, the best of luck at your new position. Yes, I'll be reappearing in not too long somewhere else. But, you know, thank you so much for having me on. I've enjoyed listening to the podcast for years. And so, you know, it's nice to be able to make an appearance. Oh, me?

Amazing. Oh, that's great to hear. All right. You can find some links to the key papers we discussed at science.org slash podcast. That was Brent Groholski. He's a physical sciences editor at Science.

And that concludes this edition of the Science Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, write to us at [email protected]. To find us on podcasting apps, search for Science Magazine, or you can listen on our website, science.org/podcast. This show was edited by me, Sarah Crespi, and Kevin MacLean. We had production help from Megan Tuck at Podigy. Our music is by Jeffrey Cook and Wenkoy Wen.

On behalf of Science and its publisher, AAAS, thanks for joining us.