Easing Access to Open Access: Clarivate Analytics partners with Impactstory

In a novel public/private partnership, Clarivate Analytics has joined with Impactstory, a non-profit organization devoted to making science more open and reusable. The arrangement will provide Web of Science users with access to over 10 million verified, legal open access (OA) articles via Impactstory’s oaDOI knowledgebase.

Currently, the Web of Science allows users to filter search results to link to OA articles designated as gold, reflecting content from journals that are completely open. This content represents only a small portion of the Web of Science corpus. The new partnership with Impactstory will widen this access to include OA articles designated as Hybrid Gold, meaning that they are openly available on sites that also maintain a paywall for some content, as well as materials that are Green OA, meaning they have been legally deposited (i.e., self-archived) in a repository.

Founded in 2011by Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem (the latter known in information-science circles for coining the term “altmetrics”), Impactstory has created a variety of tools to facilitate the open sharing and retrieval of information. One such utility, known as oaDOI, is designed to target trustworthy, “as published” versions of Green OA content. Therefore, in contrast to online OA searches that produce unreliable research or materials that are in violation of copyright laws, Web of Science searching will retrieve dependable, legitimate OA material.

With grant support from Clarivate, Impactstory will build on its oaDOI service, making OA content more easily discoverable and the research workflow more efficient – from discovery through publishing.

In a rollout currently scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2017, this new capability will benefit the Web of Science user community with an improved discovery experience embracing legitimate OA content of all types. The partnership with Impactstory represents Clarivate Analytics’ commitment to supporting initiatives that serve to legally remove barriers that researchers face in accessing the research content that is most critical for their field.