The largest fundamental science agency in Europe will save €1.4 million annually by breaking free from Clavariate Analytics' commercial databases of references and citations.
Starting January 1st 2026, the CNRS will stop subscribing from the Web of Science, along with the Core Collection and Journal Citation Reports.
"We have worked for free to lock ourselves collectively into a paid system", one head of the CNRS explains - but no more! 🎉
https://www.cnrs.fr/en/update/cnrs-breaking-free-web-science
@johncarlosbaez who is still using impact factors anyway ? But not prividing access to WoS, for some disciplines this will be a big problem . At least in my case, OpenAlex is still far away from giving an as complete access to available literature as WoS. Doing a thorough literature search will be much more complicated, and largely biased what is available in other databases. And some of the other "free" databases contain so much rubbish, and so little advanced search options, that it is a huge loss of time to screen through literature.
@olibrendel - In Europe, Spain and Italy seem to be among the biggest users of impact-factor-like criteria.
The Italian national habilitation system (ASN) classifies faculty members according to their academic discipline and relies on journal counts, citations, and h-indices as a basis for promoting tenure track researchers to associate professors and associate to full professors. The qualification is not awarded unless at least two of three bibliometric indices show values above nationally specified thresholds.
@johncarlosbaez @olibrendel
I can confirm, in Spain impact factor is very much evaluated when assigning grants / PhDs / evaluating your scientific production.
OpenAlex, while very cool is still far from complete.
I'd like to see Scholia detach a bit from wikidata so that it could be used for that purpose more extensively.
Nothing wrong with OpenAlex, but I found plenty of errors in their database and they don't provide a way to notify the error.
@rastinza @johncarlosbaez yes, OpenAlex is a good start, but not good enough to do actual bibliographic work.
@rastinza @olibrendel - I was surprised when I looked myself up on Google and it said
John Carlos Baez is an American mathematical physicist and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Riverside in Riverside, California. He has worked on spin foams in loop quantum gravity, applications of higher categories to physics, and applied category theory. Wikipedia
Born: 1961 (age 64 years), San Francisco, CA
Partner: Lisa Raphals
h-index: 65
Nationality: American
Education: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University
Awards: Levi L. Conant Prize
The surprising thing was that it listed my h-index! I don't have any sense of whether mine h-index is good compared to other mathematicians, but mainly it's annoying to be rated in this way.