Citing eLife’s unusual practice of publishing articles without accepting or rejecting them, Clarivate says it is re-evaluating the inclusion of the open-access biology journal in Web of Science, its influential database of abstracts and citations.
In contrast to the other journals recently placed on hold from indexing, including Elsevier’s Science of the Total Environment, Clarivate has cited a specific policy as the reason for re-evaluating eLife: “Coverage of journals/platforms in which publication is decoupled from validation by peer review.”
A Clarivate spokesperson described the policy as applying to “journals that do not make an editorial decision to accept or reject based on peer reviewers’ comments.”
eLife last year adopted a new model in which it publishes every manuscript its editors send out for review, along with the text of the reviews and an editor’s assessment of the significance of the findings in the paper and the strength of the evidence presented.
Damian Pattinson, eLife’s executive director, described Clarivate’s decision to re-evaluate the journal due to its new model as “a real overreach,” and expressed concern about Web of Science’s “dominance” in the publishing industry. “It’s not for them to decide the rules of publishing,” he said.
“The issue comes down to what they define as ‘validated,’” Pattinson told us. “We believe all papers we publish are validated by peer review,” he said, because they undergo a “very rigorous” review and evaluation process that is “deliberately transparent and open.”
eLife sees its process as a “huge improvement” on a publishing system that’s otherwise a “black box” about the quality of review a paper has received, Pattinson said. “It is a bit disheartening they seem to be working to maintain this existing very opaque system,” he said of Clarivate.
The Clarivate spokesperson indicated Web of Science might index some eLife papers but not others:
In these cases, we will only evaluate and index – assuming our standard quality criteria are met – the subset of published content that peer reviewers have deemed to pass a ‘sound science’ threshold. We will exclude content where peer review indicates shortcomings in methodology or other reasons to doubt the validity of the published results or conclusions. In the case of eLife, we will consider content that has ‘strength of evidence’ described by the journal as ‘Solid’, ‘Convincing’, ‘Compelling’ or ‘Exceptional’ but exclude ‘Incomplete’ or ‘Inadequate’.
Continuing cover-to-cover indexing of eLife would mean indexing content that is ‘Incomplete’ or ‘Inadequate’ and risks allowing untrustworthy actors to benefit from publishing poor quality content, and conflicts with our standard policy to reject/remove journals that fail to put effective measures in place to prevent the publication of compromised content.
Our policy to allow only partial indexing of journals that de-couple publication from peer review reflects our commitment to support the integrity of the scholarly record through curation and selectivity in the Web of Science.
In a statement posted to its website, eLife said it “never wanted” an Impact Factor. The statement continued:
Publication alone is a poor signal and measure of validity. A journal name or its Impact Factor says little about the quality of any individual research article. Instead we created a model that reviews, assesses and directly engages with research without the need for proxies.
Pattinson acknowledged the value of indexing and its importance for authors. eLife has been discussing its model with Clarivate for a while, he said, and will talk with its partners and funders about how to move forward.
Last month, Clarivate placed Cureus and Heliyon on hold to re-evaluate whether they meet its quality criteria. Science of the Total Environment, an Elsevier title, was also recently placed on hold. A pop-up message on its listing on Clarivate’s website states:
Concerns have been raised about the quality of the content published in this journal. The journal is being re-evaluated according to our selection criteria; new content will not be indexed during the course of the re-evaluation.
If Clarivate decides an “on hold” journal does meet its quality criteria after re-evaluation, it will index any missing content. Clarivate declined to provide a list of journals currently on hold, “as these are temporary statuses and do not represent a decision or conclusion by the editorial team on the coverage of the journal,” according to a spokesperson.
“There has been no shift in strategy,” the spokesperson said, in response to our question about Web of Science re-evaluating major journals. They continued:
As with Science of the Total Environment and other journals recently placed On Hold, we continue to proactively monitor changes in journal behavior, consider community feedback and periodically re-evaluate journals to ensure they continue to meet our quality criteria. If valid concerns arise regarding an indexed journal – either through internal monitoring by our AI tools and/or in-house editors, and/or external feedback – the journal will be re-evaluated according to our quality criteria. During this period, new content will not be processed for indexing and an ‘On Hold’ notice will be placed on the Master Journal List for transparency.
A spokesperson for Elsevier confirmed Clarivate had placed Science of the Total Environment on hold for re-evaluation. The spokesperson said:
Our Research Integrity & Publishing Ethics Centre of Expertise in STMJ is conducting in-depth investigations. These investigations are reviewing potential breaches of Science of the Total Environment’s publishing policies and are being carried out in accordance with Elsevier’s policies and the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
We are addressing the concerns raised during the investigation and, in parallel, we are working with Clarivate to aid in their re-evaluation.
Besides the journals placed on hold, this month’s update to Web of Science kicked off 11 titles, including Springer Nature’s Multimedia Tools and Applications and Environmental Science and Pollution Research. The latter journal has been retracting articles en masse this year, as we previously reported, and did not receive an Impact Factor when Clarivate released new numbers in June. Springer Nature did not respond to our request for comment by the time of publication.
Clarivate also delisted Minerva Pediatrics, which we reported in July had published several out-of-scope articles about “elderly” patients. The publisher did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
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My sympathy for eLife in this matter is slim. The roll out of their new policy last year involved a substantial marketing campaign about the alleged “black box” of peer review, while glossing over that they basically just re-packaged it as the “black box” of editorial review. They marketed this as a form of justice for science, while also, at the time, de-emphasizing the fact that the majority of submissions are desk rejected (~70% by their own report: https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/66d43597/elife-s-new-model-one-year-on ). I am not saying that they should take more papers, that is up to them and their editorial & strategy decision to compete with the big dogs for impact (Science, Nature, PNAS, Cell, JEM, et al.). However, they have little moral ground to stand on here, in my opinion, given the thinly justified altruism and borderline false advertising around their new (2023) model. It became a bit frustrating at the time explaining to colleagues and trainees that eLife was NOT out to publish “all the news fit to print” as was implied by their marketing in 2023 which was sent out with different messages to both PIs and their trainees (what they refer to as “career advisory” or something along those lines). At a minimum, Clarivate has inadvertently called them on their B.S.
Pubmed indexing of articles is used as a gold standard by researchers, funding agencies, and for job promotions. The NLM should invest its resources in cleaning the content and streamlining the procedure for indexing.
1. Get rid of non-medical content such as particle physics, cosmology etc from PUBMED.
2. Get rid of predatory and hijacked journals from indexing
3. Enforce conflict of interest issues (Ex. Editors can not publish papers in their own journals and books)
4. Hire scientific sleuths like Dr. Bik as consultants.
This does seem like real overreach by a private company tied to the publishing industry.