That was then but this is now… #OAWeek – Part 2

Yesterday I wrote about our history of providing an independent, neutral source for the world’s most influential journals, books, proceedings and data repositories, spanning more than 50 years.

Like Eugene Garfield, we value what scientists and scholars do and we honor their commitment and dedication to their institutions and their colleagues. A vital research activity that has been undervalued historically is peer review, a truly unselfish and “under-rewarded” service.

That is why, earlier this year, we acquired Publons, a pioneering enterprise that will document and provide data on the review activities of researchers. We also want to enable them to validate their contribution to the quality of published content through their reviewer activities.

We are already elevating the recognition of this activity and delivering real career rewards to researchers by documenting their reviewing experience. Institutions and their colleagues will be able to see and appreciate the many hours and tremendous effort they devote to ensuring integrity in the research communication system.

We closely monitor the development of research practices globally and consult with outside advisors, who are researchers themselves, on what is most relevant to current needs. They do not stand still nor do we. The globalization of research activity has compelled us to seek out new journals and other publications from emerging and newly developing nations. Often research in these nations and regions has a focus especially relevant to local societal needs. It is our obligation to offer our data and services regionally as well as globally, to the same standard, and for the same purpose: to provide researchers with the most useful and highest-quality content to conduct their studies successfully.

Which is why, in 2015, we introduced the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) within the Core Collection of the Web of Science. This collection of new, high-quality content extends our reach and relevance to research communities everywhere. Next week, we will launch a 10-year archive for more than 4,500 journals.  Over 33% of the journals in the ESCI are Gold Open Access journals, reflecting the commitment from many countries worldwide to making research more open.

We facilitate access to the literature not only through coverage and careful data curation, not only by timely processing and distribution of bibliographic records, not only through the precision and power of citation, but also now by provision of links to open access versions of papers.

With rapid advances and diversifications in new fields of science and technology, new journals are emerging as a location for the exchange of research methods and findings in these burgeoning communities… To fulfill growing demand, the Web of Science platform, as the world’s most trusted research publication and citation index, launched the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) in November 2015 to extend the universe of journals already included in the Science Citation Index Expanded, the Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index.  (Huang et al., 2017)

Also, in April of this year,  we were proud to partner with ImpactStory a non-profit organization devoted to making science more open and reusable with the launch of the ImpactStory Unpaywall extension (discussed here in Nature), used over a million times per week to discover accessible copies of articles. By the end of 2017, the oaDOI knowledgebase will add the accessibility data directly onto Web of Sciences search results, affording users “point-of-use” access to available full-text, thereby enhancing and extending library or institutional holdings. Gathering data on OA articles from over 5,300 repositories like PMC, as well as Crossref, DOAJ and DataCite, oaDOI has data on more than 86 million articles, and continues to grow.

Grant support from Clarivate Analytics is assisting Impactstory in making improvements to their oaDOI technology so that it can reliably identify Hybrid Gold OA and also specify versioning of Green OA that will result in retrieval of a legal, peer-reviewed, “as published” version of a given paper. In short, access to the most trustworthy OA materials.

In a blog post entitled “Changing the Culture for Scholarly Communications,”’ Alice Meadows of ORCID talks about the importance of bringing together the right stakeholders to identify common ground and agree on a way forward in order to advance open science.

This is very much the goal of Force11, which has grown from a small group of like-minded individuals into an open movement with clearly identified stakeholders associated with emerging technologies, policies, funding mechanisms and business models.  Consistent with the theme of Open Access Week,  Clarivate Analytics is “Open to partnering with the research community in order to advance the communication of scientific knowledge,” as illustrated by our opening key note with Jason Priem and Heather Piwowar of Impactstory, on “Ubiquitous Open Access: Changing culture by integrating OA into user workflows,” at the Force 2017 meeting this week in Berlin, Germany.

To learn more about how Clarivate Analytics is maximizing the free availability of new research findings and other scholarly output, please follow this link to download our white paper on ‘Opening the way to Open Access’.