Scopus: caught-out and shirking responsibility | Ross Mounce
flavoursofopenscience's bookmarks 2024-01-14
Summary:
In December last year, it was widely publicized e.g. in Science magazine [1], that Scopus has been instrumental in legitimizing publication scams whereby authors pay to bypass real scholarly peer review and have their work published on a website that looks like a real scholarly journal but is in fact not a proper journal, merely an impersonation of one. Scopus was thoroughly caught-out with some excellent, well-documented work by Anna Albakina [2]. Kudos to Anna!
As the Science article explains, the scammers: “….managed to get Scopus to list a URL other than the real journal’s…” , I have heard nothing so far from Elsevier or Scopus about their investigation as to how this happened. Isn’t it a very important and basic part of their job to get the identity of the material they are indexing correct? One amusing response I do note from Scopus is that rather than investigating the issue and implementing new processes to do a better job of it – they’ve actually just decided to completely abandon doing that particular job! On the 18th December 2023, Scopus posted a message on their official blog (yes, I checked the URL, it’s not a “hijacked” blog, this is the official Scopus blog – see Scopus, it’s not hard to check the URL provenance!) to say: “Scopus will remove the Source Homepage links from all Source details pages“. [3]
The corporate double-speak in operation in this blog post is… hmmm. On the one hand, they want to reassure readers that “Maintaining the integrity of Scopus and its high-quality, curated content is of paramount importance to us…” and “Ensuring research integrity is a top priority for us…” but the actual thing this post is announcing is that they have been caught-out and now they no longer wish to bear the responsibility of pointing accurately to where a peer-reviewed journal exists on the web (the ‘Source Homepage’ in Scopus-speak). Disapprovingly, I also note that Albakina’s excellent work that almost certainly prompted this, is not mentioned or cited anywhere in this corporate blog post ☹ . I wonder if any of the Scopus customers were consulted about this change in service? Aren’t the customers paying for this information service? To suddenly take it away is rather interesting…
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