In the Dark

Here’s some good news for advocates of open research. Sorbonne University (Paris) has made an important announcement. I quote:

Sorbonne University has been deeply committed to the promotion and the development of  open science for many years. According to its commitment to open research information, it has decided to discontinue its subscription to the Web of Science publication database and Clarivate bibliometric tools in 2024. By resolutely abandoning the use of proprietary bibliometric products, it is opening the way for open, free and participative tools.

That’s the way to do it! Such a decision requires real intellectual leadership, so I’m not sure how many other universities will follow suit. Those paralyzed by managerialism probably won’t.

The Sorbonne statement goes on to explain:

This decision is in line with the University’s overall policy of openness, and it is now working to consolidate a sustainable, international alternative, in particular by using OpenAlex.

Both Web of Science and Clarivate are, of course, fronts for the academic publishing industry and are just as pointless, as they sell to subscribers a biased subset of information which is already in the public domain through services such as CrossRef.

While I’m congratulating Sorbonne for its leadership, I should do likewise (though in a different context) for Utrecht University, which refused to participate in this year’s Times Higher World Rankings. Among their reasons are

• Rankings put too much stress on scoring and competition, while we want to focus on collaboration and open science.
• The makers of the rankings use data and methods that are highly questionable, research shows. 

I hope more institutions join the fight back against the box-tickers in this regard too, although I’m not particularly hopeful here either.

This entry was posted on December 10, 2023 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Education, Open Access with tags Clarivate, open science, Sorbonne University, Web of Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.