The reduction in investments for science in Brazil is already making the work of researchers and universities in the country difficult — and the trend is to get worse in the coming years.
Data from the SBPC (Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science), for example, show that Capes (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) and CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) lost approximately 51% of the budget to finance research in the last ten years.
The lack of resources, however, could be even more acute in 2022. The estimates of the decrease for this year, made by the entity, still did not consider the recent cuts that the Bolsonaro government announced – only in the Ministry of Education, to which Capes is linked, the budget decrease reached R$ 802.6 million.
In Brazil, a large part of the scientific production is carried out in graduate programs whose main sources of funding for students are scholarships. For a master’s degree, the monthly fee at the federal level is R$1,500, while for a doctorate it jumps to R$2,200.
One of the most important universities in the country, UFRJ had a decrease in scholarships, mainly for post-doctoral studies — research internships with a monthly payment of R$ 4,100 or R$ 4,400. According to data from the entity, there was a reduction of approximately 39% in this category of scholarship between 2015 and 2020.
Denise Pires, the university’s dean, explains that the institution has not had major reductions in master’s and doctoral funding, because its programs are considered excellent in Capes’ assessment.
In other institutions, however, she explains, courses with lower assessments tend to suffer more cuts. This reduction is worrying, says Pires, because it affects courses that are newer and at universities that still need to consolidate their research fronts, especially in the Northeast and North regions.
Thus, she points out, reducing funding can hamper the development and innovation potential of these parts of the country.
Another university that reports problems is UnB (University of Brasília). According to Maria Emília Walter, dean of research and innovation at the university, the institution has already had around a thousand scholarships cut in recent years, even in courses with excellent assessments.
“We have a program that has reduced postgraduate scholarships by up to 50%”, he says.
In addition to the decrease in scholarships, another concern that affects national postgraduate studies is the delay in the four-year Capes evaluation. It is through this analysis that courses are qualified by various criteria of excellence, such as quantity and quality of scientific publications.
In September 2021, the assessment was suspended on an injunction by the Federal Court. According to information from Capes, the process was only resumed on December 2. The situation “caused the need to postpone the evaluation schedule”, said the municipality in a note to leaf.
Currently, the estimate is that the final results of the evaluation will only be released in December 2022.
The delay in this process makes it difficult, for example, for graduate programs to be able to estimate how many scholarships they will have available for students, in addition to achieving a model recognized for consolidating research in universities.
“By paralyzing Capes’ evaluation, you paralyze the entire national postgraduate system, because you interrupt scholarships, congress funding, exchange incentives. You basically paralyze scientific practice”, says Mariana Chaguri, professor in the sociology department at Unicamp (State University of Campinas).
Regarding scholarships, Capes reported that “it has expanded support for research and training of human resources”, such as through “programs to combat Covid-19, with 2,600 scholarships, for postgraduate development in the states, with 1,800 grants, and in the Legal Amazon, with 488 grants”.
CNPq, in a note, stated that “from 2011 onwards, with the creation of the Science without Borders Program, there was an extra contribution to the CNPq budget for scholarships granted under this action”. “Thus, as the Program’s scholarships came to an end, the budget returned to previous levels, since there was no continuity of the initiative”, he said.
Another dilemma that worries Brazilian scientists is the lack of funding for scientific journals.
“When production [científica] Brazilian market does not have so many channels to be shipped, this impacts on competitiveness [com outros países]. There are also effects on public impact, because scientific discoveries cannot circulate,” says Chaguri.
According to CNPq, in 2018 there was a public call for the editorial program aimed at financing journals in the amount of R$ 4 million, also with resources from Capes. In 2019, the investment decreased to R$ 1.5 million.
In 2020, there was no public notice published and, in 2021, the agency resumed with a total investment of R$ 3 million — it is expected that the resources will be made available in 2022.
Even so, scientific journals already indicate that the budget is small compared to the needs of publications.
Some, for example, started charging APC calls (article processing fees) to cover production costs. These amounts are paid to publications when a researcher submits an article or when it is approved.
One such case is the Revista de Sociologia e Política, which in 2021 began to collect a fee of approximately R$1,500 from authors with texts approved for publication.
“We were faced with two alternatives: either the authors pay for the edition of their article or the magazine ends”, says Adriano Condato, editor-in-chief of the publication.
The publication was approved in the last CNPq public notice with a contribution of R$ 12 thousand for 2022, but this does not cover expenses, which are around R$ 40 thousand per year.
Another example is the Brazilian Political Science Review, which adopted the charging of fees in 2020. “After losing several public funds, it was necessary to take the measure not to close the doors”, explains Adrian Lavalle, editor-in-chief of the journal.
He states that the policies for financing journals have always been in deficit. Lavalle emphasizes that one of the requirements of the CNPq public notice is that the journal be indexed to Scielo, a platform for free access to scientific articles.
“The overwhelming majority of periodicals in the country are not in the Scielo collection. [revistas] departmental and published in precarious situations”, he says. “Public funding never helped these journals. There is no universal policy for journals in Brazil”, he explains.
For Luiz Campos, representative of the humanities collection at Scielo, “the increase in APC among scientific publications may be an indication of the problems that these journals face in recent years”.
“[A cobrança de taxas] it’s a movement that’s getting faster [no país] because of the crisis. Nowadays, a magazine that does not have public resources has very few means to maintain itself”, he says.
The consequences already appear in data from the Scielo platform: there was an 18% reduction between 2020 and 2021 in the number of articles in indexed journals, the biggest annual decrease seen since 2001.
AT leaf, CNPq reported that the 2021 contribution to the “editorial program had a substantial growth in relation to the last public call”, even in a year with “budget constriction”.
The agency also indicated that “for 2022, if FNDCT resources are transferred [Fundo Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico], it will be possible to increase the contribution of resources in a new call”.
.
