The HardiBlog

Traditionally, academic publishing has been closed, which means that readers can only access research outputs if you or the institution you are affiliated with pay for them through subscriptions. However, research metrics – approximate measures of how many papers have been published and how often they have been cited – are created by the same companies that publish and index the research.  These commercial interests mean that research metrics such as Clarivate’s “Journal Impact Factor” and the Scopus “CiteScore” are biased in such a way that they reward publishing and citing sources within these same companies. This means that university ranking systems based on these metrics are also biased; therefore, proprietary research metrics and commercial university rankings are all part of the same closed research infrastructure. Recently, many institutions have started to withdraw from this closed, commercially-driven research infrastructure, as detailed in part 1 of this post , which als...

Major commercial research indexing services such as Web of Science ( Clarivate ) and Scopus ( Elsevier/RELX ) have transformed research discovery and benchmarking over the past few decades. However, many institutions are now reassessing their use of these services, due to considerations around cost, transparency, governance, and alignment with open research values.  For example, institutions such as the Sorbonne, the University of Utrecht, the University of Zurich, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are dropping their subscriptions to these expensive, for-profit indexing services.  They are also withdrawing from venture-capital driven league tables such as the “Times Higher Education World University Rankings”, controlled by Inflexion Private Equity , and commercial rankings including “Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings” (QS WUR), operated by Quacquarelli Symonds (which also runs topuniversities.com ) and “US News and World Report Best Global Univ...