Beyond Closed Research Metrics: Rethinking Research Discovery and Rankings (part 1 of 2)
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 Universities” (US News) owned by billionaire Mortimer Zuckerman. Please see the table at the bottom of this piece for links to the individual announcements.
For-profit ranking systems; for-profit metrics
There is a direct, mutually beneficial relationship between citation indices and rankings manufactured by for-profit companies. The largest proportion of the total ranking in THE WUR 2026, “Research quality”, 30%, is supplied by Scopus data. For the QS WUR, Scopus data in the “Citations per Faculty” section accounts for 20% of the overall metric. US News Global Rankings are based on an initial list from Clarivate’s global reputation survey, which is then supplemented by Web of Science data.
This feedback loop between manufactured statistics such as “Journal Impact Factor” (invented by Clarivate) and “CiteScore” (invented by Elsevier) and the prestige engines creates a “perverse effect” whereby governments and institutions chase “false signifiers of merit” that end up “making losers out of everyone” (Gadd, 2023). Because of this, there is a growing call for a managed transition toward more transparent community-governed research information systems.
A key thing to note about the companies in the previous paragraph is that their business models and governance do not align with the missions and values of publicly funded universities, including University of Galway: “A research-intensive university where we nurture talent and generate knowledge for the world” (Strategy 2025-2030). In addition, their profits are underpinned by the freely provided labour of researchers, librarians, research officers, and institutions, including:
- submitting research articles and books for publication
- performing peer review and editorial services for commercial publishers
- paying Article Processing Charges or subscription fees to access the “published” version of the work
- negotiating and facilitating payment for journal subscriptions and read-and-publish deals or so-called “transformative agreements”
- granting and restricting access to purchased content through myriad proprietary dashboards and vendor portals
- submitting responses to subjective “reputation surveys” for external rankings companies
- asking colleagues at other institutions to submit reciprocal positive responses to such surveys.
This opaque ecosystem is laid bare in “The Drain of Scientific Publishing” (Beigel et al., 2025). “The Drain” explains how the extractive model of scholarly publishing diverts public money (researchers’ salaries, library salaries and subscription budgets, governmental research funding awards) into annual profit margins over 30% for the largest publishers: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley (Table 1, p. 3).
Towards a non-profit publishing ecosystem
How can institutions reduce their dependence on closed and commercially-driven systems over time? One suggestion is for funders, universities, and governments to redirect their resources toward non-profit, community-led infrastructures that align scholarly communication with public interest rather than profit through “re-communalisation” (Beigel et al., 2025). A related approach of “commoning” is advocated by Sam Moore, who declares in his book Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons, “The task of an approach to publishing that is emancipatory from market control is to strategically withdraw the labour extracted by commercial publishers and redirect it to those who offer self-governance through the commons” (Moore, 2025). Three significant pieces of non-profit, community-led infrastructure offer alternative solutions to various pieces of the puzzle:
- publish-review-curate platforms and diamond/APC-free open access publishing as an alternative to commercial author-pays, subscription-based publication outlets
- the fully transparent bibliographic database OpenAlex as an alternative to proprietary commercial databases
- the open edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking as an alternative to commercial rankings.
These solutions are explored in more depth in part 2 of this post. Each of the solutions is part of the necessary infrastructure for open research. They represent an important step away from “closed” research metrics that are driven largely by commercial interests.
Open Research at the University of Galway
At the University of Galway, we have joined the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), and we are members of the National Chapter. We have also signed the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information, Our Future Memory, and OA2020. (Please see this announcement for more information on each of those global initiatives.) Our Research Publishing Policy (QA237) provides immediate, licensed, repository-based open access for all authors’ accepted manuscripts on publication.
In addition, there is scope for further improvements as we move from current practice to future practice, such as
- strengthening the culture around repository-based (green) publishing
- improving our research metadata
- piloting the use of open bibliographic sources alongside commercial tools
- seeking opportunities where open alternatives can progressively replace closed systems
Further guidance detailing the proactive work done by the Library on behalf of authors is available here: rights retention, research publishing. We are scheduling roadshows across the university this spring, and we look forward to continuing to support authors to make their high-quality research openly accessible to everyone.
Written by Dr. Jen Smith, Open Research Librarian.
Please note that all references are listed at the end of part 2 of this post.
The table below lists institutions that have cancelled content subscriptions or withdrawn contributions to ranking companies. It is ordered chronologically by announcement date.
| Institution (country) | Product cancelled | Announcement date | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| London South Bank University (UK) | Elsevier | 2026-02-17 | Research Professional article |
| Sheffield Hallam University (UK) | Elsevier | 2026-02-10 | Research Professional article |
| University of Kent; University of Essex (UK) | Elsevier | 2026-01-22 | Research Professional article |
| CNRS (FR) | Web of Science | 2025-12-01 | CNRS announcement |
| University of Jyväskylä (FI) | Web of Science | 2025-11-24 | University announcement |
| Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL) | Web of Science | 2025-11-10 | University announcement |
| University of Utrecht (NL) | Web of Science | 2025-10-31 | University announcement |
| Sorbonne University (FR) | Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE WUR) | 2025-10-13 | Sorbonne announcement |
| University of York (UK) | Scopus | 2025-01-08 | Research Professional article |
| University of Surrey (UK) | Scopus | 2025-01-06 | University page |
| University of Sheffield (UK) | Scopus | 2024-12-31 | University announcement |
| University of Zurich (CH) | THE WUR | 2024-03-13 | University announcement |
| CNRS (FR) | Scopus | 2024-01-11 | CNRS announcement |
| Sorbonne University (FR) | Web of Science | 2023-12-11 | Sorbonne announcement |
| University of Utrecht (NL) | THE WUR | 2023-09-29 | University announcement |
| University Rankings Forum of Korea (52 universities) | QS World Rankings | 2023-07-04 | University World News article |
| Columbia University (USA) | US News and World Report Rankings (USNWRR) | 2023-06-06 | New York Times article |
| Yale Law School (USA) | USNWRR | 2022-08-16 | Yale Daily News article |
| Harvard University (USA) | USNWRR | 2022-08-16 | Harvard Crimson article |
| MIT (USA) | Elsevier | 2020-06-11 | MIT announcement |
Continue reading part 2 of this post.
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