Clarivate Announces Partnership with AI21 Labs as part of its Generative AI Strategy to Drive Growth

“Clarivate Plc (NYSE: CLVT), a global leader in connecting people and organizations to intelligence they can trust to transform their world, today announced a strategic partnership with AI21 Labs, a pioneer in generative artificial intelligence (AI). The collaboration will integrate large language models into solutions from Clarivate, to enable intuitive academic conversational search and discovery, specifically designed to foster researcher excellence and drive success for researchers and students, while adhering to core academic principles and values.

AI has the potential to revolutionize the world, but its effectiveness relies heavily on the quality of the training data. With billions of trusted, curated, articles, books, documents and propriety best in class data points, Clarivate is well-placed to lead the market on this opportunity, providing customers with the highest quality open, licensed and proprietary content, data and insights while mitigating associated risks….”

Fast-growing open-access journals stripped of coveted impact factors | Science | AAAS

“Nearly two dozen journals from two of the fastest growing open-access publishers, including one of the world’s largest journals by volume, will no longer receive a key scholarly imprimatur. On 20 March, the Web of Science database said it delisted the journals along with dozens of others, stripping them of an impact factor, the citation-based measure of quality that, although controversial, carries weight with authors and institutions. The move highlights continuing debate about a business model marked by high volumes of articles, ostensibly chosen for scientific soundness rather than novelty, and the practice by some open-access publishers of recruiting large numbers of articles for guest-edited special issues.

The Web of Science Master Journal List, run by the analytics company Clarivate, lists journals based on 24 measures of quality, including effective peer review and adherence to ethical publishing practices, and periodically checks that listed journals meet the standards. Clarivate calculates impact factors for a select subset of journals on the list. The company expanded quality checks this year because of “increasing threats to the integrity of the scholarly record,” Web of Science’s Editor-in-Chief Nandita Quaderi says. The company removed 50 journals from the list, an unusually large number for a single year, and Clarivate said it is continuing to review 450 more, assisted by an artificial intelligence (AI) tool….”

Fast-growing open-access journals stripped of coveted impact factors | Science | AAAS

“Nearly two dozen journals from two of the fastest growing open-access publishers, including one of the world’s largest journals by volume, will no longer receive a key scholarly imprimatur. On 20 March, the Web of Science database said it delisted the journals along with dozens of others, stripping them of an impact factor, the citation-based measure of quality that, although controversial, carries weight with authors and institutions. The move highlights continuing debate about a business model marked by high volumes of articles, ostensibly chosen for scientific soundness rather than novelty, and the practice by some open-access publishers of recruiting large numbers of articles for guest-edited special issues.

The Web of Science Master Journal List, run by the analytics company Clarivate, lists journals based on 24 measures of quality, including effective peer review and adherence to ethical publishing practices, and periodically checks that listed journals meet the standards. Clarivate calculates impact factors for a select subset of journals on the list. The company expanded quality checks this year because of “increasing threats to the integrity of the scholarly record,” Web of Science’s Editor-in-Chief Nandita Quaderi says. The company removed 50 journals from the list, an unusually large number for a single year, and Clarivate said it is continuing to review 450 more, assisted by an artificial intelligence (AI) tool….”

Escaping ‘bibliometric coloniality’, ‘epistemic inequality’

“Africa’s scholarly journals compete on an unequal playing field because of a lack of funding and the struggle to sustain academic credibility.

“These inequalities are exacerbated by the growing influence of the major citation indexes, leading to what we have called bibliometric coloniality,” say the authors of the book, Who Counts? Ghanaian academic publishing and global science, published by African Minds at the start of 2023.

“The rules of the game continue to be defined outside the continent. We hope that, in some small way, this book contributes to the renaissance and renewal of African-centred research and publishing infrastructures,” the authors say….”

Clarivate’s former publisher relations expert joins Frontiers | Research Information

“Research publisher Frontiers appoints Tom Ciavarella as head of public affairs and advocacy for North America to strategise and execute advocacy initiatives to support Frontiers’ mission and accelerate transition to open science.

Tom has 20 years’ experience in relationship management, business development, and content strategy. After an early career in copy-editing and writing, he worked at F.A. Davis Company, an independent medical publisher in the US, where he acquired and developed new medical textbooks and helped bring print-only resources into the digital world. In 2015, Tom joined Clarivate Analytics (now Clarivate) as a publisher relations manager for Web of Science Group with a focus on content and communication strategy. 

Most recently, Tom managed large strategic accounts for the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), a non-profit that helps publishers and other copyright holders coordinate content delivery, licensing, and open access workflows. Tom also served as a liaison to CCC’s government relations team, which works to guide policymakers on copyright modernisation and related topics. …”

The End of Journal Impact Factor Purgatory (and Numbers to the Thousandths) – The Scholarly Kitchen

“Clarivate Analytics announced today that they are granting all journals in the Web of Science Core Collection an Impact Factor with the 2023 release….

In 2015, Clarivate launched the ESCI. It was initially described as an index of journals that are up-and-coming — meaning new journals, or established journals in niche areas that are growing in impact. At the time of launch, publishers were told that a journal selected for ESCI will likely get an Impact Factor within a few years.

The model for ESCI seemed to shift a few years later and there are many journals in ESCI that have been there since 2015 that still don’t have Impact Factors. In fact, Clarivate includes content for indexed journals back to 2005 so there clearly were journals older than 10 years in the database when it launched.

Clarivate reports that ESCI has over 7800 journals with 3 million records. A little over a third of those records are open access records.

The inclusion criteria for all four indices include 24 quality measures and four “impact” measures. Those journals that meet all 28 criteria are included in SCIE, SSCI, and AHCI. Those that only meet the 24 quality measures were relegated to the ESCI….

The second big announcement today is that with the 2023 release, Clarivate will “display” Impact Factors with only one decimal place instead of three! …”

 

This change announced today indicates that the four impact measures are no longer required in order to get an Impact Factor….”

The Conquest of ProQuest and Knowledge Unlatched: How recent mergers are bad for research and the public

“We wish we could say that these types of corporate consolidations were unusual for the information services industry, but we can’t. Clarivate-ProQuest and Wiley-KU follow in a long line of library vendors that have merged or consolidated, particularly in recent years. Librarians and researchers have watched dozens of academic journal publishers dwindle to a small, powerful publishing oligopoly that controls the research market. We’ve also seen our library services management products—including catalogs, digital lending services, and collection development management tools—get consumed, piece-by-piece, by ProQuest, the same library platform monopolist that Clarivate purchased in a $5.3 billion deal. Library workers are well aware of the shrinking options that librarians have under the growing control of just a few companies….

This means that companies like RELX and Clarivate aren’t traditional library services providers and information publishers—they’re data analytics companies. In the research space, these analytics companies are particularly insidious….”