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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.
“We aim to create and sustain research infrastructure that’s truly aligned with . . . the values of the research community.”
He said OpenAlex was in discussions with other institutions to become premium clients like the Sorbonne, to give them more detailed and rapid access to its database. Several universities such as Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, have already signed up. It is being consulted by tens of thousands of users daily.
Originally developed to assist university libraries in identifying the most respected journals to which they should subscribe, academic search services have become important scholarly yardsticks. “Bibliometric” providers such as Web of Science and Scopus, a service owned by Elsevier, a leading publisher of academic journals, are widely used to identify important research, helping to burnish the impact of the leading peer-reviewed publications.
They also influence university rankings and the financial support extended by grant-giving organisations and governments, and offer guidance for students, graduates and employers on where to apply or recruit.
They argue that their work helps ensure quality at a time of growing concern over fabricated data and unauthorised paper mills paid to produce research without rigorous peer review, as well as offering a platform to systematically collect, format and store academic output.
However, bibliometric measures have sparked a backlash by academics and universities, which argue that they are often simplistic ratings skewed by factors including a predominance of English-language publications. They also criticise the expensive paywalls for many journals.
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.
Clarivate said: “We do not comment on our customers’ commercial decisions.” It added that by using Web of Science, “institutions can be assured they are providing their users with the most comprehensive view of trusted open access, and delivering easier access to more free full text — extending their library budgets”.
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