Faithful blog readers will recall UC's long battle with commercial academic publisher Elsevier over the issue of cost and access to various journals. Eventually, a settlement was reached in 2021.* Nonetheless, the concerns persist. It seems the Sorbonne is leading the charge over this matter in Europe. From the Financial Times:
A leading French university has cancelled its contract with a commercial provider of academic data to switch to a non-profit rival, boosting a growing movement to make research available for free.
From January 1, the Sorbonne will work with OpenAlex, a recently developed service offering free online access to search and analytical tools for academics’ publications, after dropping its longstanding partnership with Web of Science, owned by UK-based Clarivate.
The action is part of a wider pushback against the current model in academic publishing, where researchers publish and review papers for free but have to buy expensive subscriptions to the journals in which they are published to analyse data relating to their work. Thousands of researchers have turned to open-access platforms in recent years.
Élisabeth Angel-Perez, vice-president for research and innovation at the Sorbonne, which paid Clarivate $51,000 this year, said the “radical decision” was designed to “reappropriate the results of research and to be in a position to regain control and ownership of what we produce”.
Jason Priem, a founder of OpenAlex, said: “We felt there’s a mismatch between the values of the academy and the shareholder boardroom. Research is fundamentally about sharing, while for-profits are fundamentally about capturing and enclosing." ...
Google Scholar provides some free information on academic publications including an index to measure the impact of authors’ research, but only allows limited analysis or explanations of which articles it prioritises.
OpenAlex, which draws on a similar free service developed and then scrapped in 2021 by Microsoft Academic, already indexes 250mn articles. Launched in 2022, it is built with open-source software and funded primarily by Arcadia, a UK-based charitable fund.
*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-elsevier-deal.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment