Introducing new open access data in Journal Citation Reports

At Clarivate, we’re always looking for ways to make the process of scientific discovery faster, more robust and more transparent. We believe a large part of this can be achieved through embracing open research – including open access (OA) and open science – and we support the many different activities, products and facets of open research.

The research publishing landscape is undergoing rapid change, disrupting the longstanding dominance of the subscription model and replacing it with open access models. Funders, librarians and publishers are looking to improve transparency of open access, with publishers under increasing pressure to eliminate or shorten embargoes, improve open access options and to ‘flip’ traditional subscription or hybrid journals to make all research articles freely accessible and reusable upon publication via a Creative Commons license – usually referred to as gold OA.

To help the research community navigate through this complex transition, we have added open access data to Journal Citation Reports™ (JCR) profile pages to increase transparency around how much of the scholarly literature is published using the gold OA model, and how much of this content is being cited. This will help the research community better understand the contribution of gold OA content to the literature and its influence on scholarly discourse.

 

OA in Journal Citation Reports

The new descriptive feature uses Our Research (formerly ImpactStory) data to identify content published under a Creative Commons license (gold OA) and allows it to be easily differentiated from subscription or free to read content (which may not be free to re-use.) This provides funders, publishers, librarians, and researchers with transparent, publisher-neutral information about the relative contribution of gold OA articles to a journal’s overall volume of content and citations. The feature is in beta until the release of the 2020 Journal Citation Reports  in June.

For the approximately 5,200 hybrid journals in Journal Citation Reports, users will be able to quickly and easily compare:

  • The number of gold OA research and review articles versus the number of subscription and free to read research and review articles
  • Citations to gold OA research and review articles versus citations to subscription and free to read research and review articles

Introducing this additional data into JCR will help us all understand the impact of scholarly content published via gold OA, and publishers and funders will be able to make better informed, more confident decisions on open access policy and strategy, furthering their objectives of increasing transparency around open access to academic research.

How else do we support open research?

We support open research by investing in community-driven projects and products (e.g. our significant grant to Our Research, formerly ImpactStory) allowing them to scale their database, which is now widely used by the academic community, by constantly innovating and improving our own products and providing insights based on Web of Science™ data and our industry expertise.

Web of Science was the first citation database and research intelligence platform to provide easy access to peer-reviewed OA articles by embedding OA data, and there are now over 12 million articles with OA versions in the Web of Science. Our publisher-neutral approach means that our data is the best combination of robust OA data and careful editorial curation, helping researchers to avoid pitfalls such as being steered to predatory publishing activities (with the free-to-use Master Journal List being a safe entry point for millions of researchers every year).

Because some citation databases exclude green OA and/or lack stringent selection criteria, the Web of Science remains the only citation database that comprehensively covers editorially controlled, peer-reviewed and versioned open research.

Going beyond open access

We believe it is important to go beyond open access by investing in open tools and other aspects of open science. We were one of the founding sponsors of ORCiD and contributed code from our own product ResearcherID to help get it started.

Through EndNoteClick, we help researchers get the best, legal version of full-text articles with just one click, improving access to high-quality research. This is increasingly important to academics working from home, and of course, it is free for researchers to use.

We enable transparency and openness in peer review through Publons™, enabling researchers to get recognition for their peer review contributions. And the Web of Science Data Citation Index™ makes open research data more discoverable.

Last but by no means least, the Institute for Scientific Information™ (ISI) has also published a free report on the potential impact of Plan S on the publishing landscape (“The Plan S Footprint”, March 2019), examining the extent of funding from cOAlition S, and exploring the effects on different disciplines, regions and publishers.

We’re proud of our record on open research, and of the latest development in Journal Citation Reports, which brings us full circle – enabling transparency to support a scholarly ecosystem in transition.

To find out more about Journal Citation Reports visit our website .