I like the new Clarivate-Impactstory partnership for several reasons, but...

peter.suber's bookmarks 2017-06-23

Summary:

"I like the new Clarivate-Impactstory partnership for several reasons....However, the Clarivate PR team...inserted this passage into the press release: "Researchers conducting online searches for scholarly articles frequently get unreliable results that can compromise their work. This is typically because the results omit journal articles behind paid-subscription paywalls or because 'web-scraping' utilities return versions of articles that are not peer-reviewed or are in violation of copyright laws." ...

It's true that search results can be unreliable because they omit paywalled articles. But there are a few problems with the rest of the passage....

* The sentence on web-scraping utilities is obscure. Because it mentions articles that are not peer-reviewed, it seems to be an oblique criticism of preprint repositories. But preprint repositories depend on voluntary author deposits, not web scraping. Moreover, finding preprints in a search is a feature for people who know how to use them, not a bug. It doesn't make the search less reliable. The criticism misses the target. 

* Perhaps the reference to web scraping is an oblique criticism of Sci-Hub. But Sci-Hub focuses on refereed postprints, indeed versions of record, not unrefereed preprints. Moreover, it depends on downloads, even if illicit, not web scraping. The criticism misses the target.

* The final part implies that finding illegal copies of peer-reviewed articles in a search makes the search unreliable. This is false. The writer probably meant to criticize these copies for infringement, but instead criticizes them for unreliability. The criticism misses the target."

Link:

https://plus.google.com/+PeterSuber/posts/X8xhZZQp49C

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.clarivate oa.impactstory oa.oadoi oa.unpaywall oa.preprints oa.sci-hub oa.versions oa.guerrilla

Date tagged:

06/23/2017, 14:09

Date published:

06/23/2017, 10:09