Opening up the CWTS Leiden Ranking: Toward a decentralized and open model for data curation - Leiden Madtrics

"Today, CWTS released the Open Edition of the Leiden Ranking. This blog post discusses the data curation approach taken in this fully transparent edition of the Leiden Ranking.

The need to increase the transparency of university rankings is widely recognized, for instance in the ten rules for ranking universities that we published in 2017, in the work done by the INORMS Research Evaluation Working Group, and also in a recent report by a Dutch expert group on university rankings (co-authored by one of us). It is therefore not surprising that the announcement of the Open Edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking in 2023 got considerable attention and triggered lots of highly supportive responses.

The announcement also led to questions about the quality of the data used in the Leiden Ranking Open Edition, in particular the affiliation data for linking publications to universities. In this post, we address these questions by distinguishing between two models for curating affiliation data: the centralized and closed model and the decentralized and open model. While the traditional Leiden Ranking relies primarily on the centralized and closed model, the Open Edition released today represents a movement toward the decentralized and open model.

The centralized and closed model for data curation

In the centralized and closed model, a central actor in the system takes responsibility for data curation. The data is closed. It can be accessed only by selected users, who typically need to pay to get access...."