Archive for Web of Science

Bravo, Sorbonne University!

Posted in Education, Open Access with tags , , , on December 10, 2023 by telescoper

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.

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A Clarivate Apology

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on July 19, 2022 by telescoper

Well, it seems that my recent post about Impact Factors has had some effect. Today I received an email from Clarivate, the salient part of which is appended below. I applied for inclusion on the Web of Science Collection in April 2021, so they have sat on this request for over a year.

Now I have to start the process  all over again. Sigh. I’m taking a wild guess here but I wonder if access to the Web of Science Publisher Portal might require the payment of a hefty subscription, so only big commercial publishers can afford it?

I suspect If I hadn’t posted about this on social media they would have ignored my submission request indefinitely.

To think so many people take this company seriously….

–0–

We are contacting you regarding the evaluation of the Open Journal of Astrophysics for the Web of Science Core Collection and following up from a recent post on social media.

Unfortunately we have not been able to evaluate your journal to this date due to the large amount of journal submissions we are continuously receiving and the implementation of new internal management systems. We are taking several actions to improve the efficiency of the editorial process, one of them is the migration of our submission platform to the Web of Science Publisher Portal. The Portal allows publishers to securely log in and submit journals for inclusion in the Web of Science Core Collection and provides a way to view the status of all journals submitted.

All journals previously submitted using the Journal Submission Form on the Master Journal List that have not received a decision regarding inclusion in the Web of Science Core Collection, have to be re-submitted through the Web of Science Publisher Portal; that is the case of the Open Journal of Astrophysics, which needs to be re-submitted. Please remember that only publishers can submit journals through the portal.

 

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