As long-time advocates for the principles of open research, we welcome the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information. We know that navigating the transition to open research is important to the scientific and scholarly community, and as a valued publisher-neutral partner, we help make that transition as seamless as possible with the tools and intelligence they need.
We value our dialogue with the research community enormously, and we actively engage with various open research initiatives, contributing intellectual assets and funding. We have a long-standing partnership with CrossRef and used our seat on the Board to support their adoption of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI).
We provided an early grant to non-profit Impactstory (now OurResearch), and as a founding sponsor of ORCID in 2010/11, we donated the foundational code from ResearcherID, to get it off the ground.
As part of the United2Act steering group, we are working with a group of international stakeholders to collaboratively address the collective challenge of paper mills in scholarly publishing. The scholarly record faces mounting challenges which erode the quality, reliability and trustworthiness of academic research and literature. Now more than ever, the selectivity of our collections and our data sources is paramount.
The curation of reliable, trusted content
Since the creation of the Science Citation Index™ by Eugene Garfield in 1964, our unwavering commitment to the meticulous curation of data from trustworthy content sources has enabled us to provide a repository of unparalleled depth, with 92.3m records going back to 1900 and 2.2bn cited references in the Web of Science Core Collection™. This offers efficiency benefits to our stakeholders, providing access to reliable, trusted information while removing the need for them to invest in extensive in-house data cleaning efforts.
Our editorial decisions are entrusted to a team of unbiased, publisher-neutral experts possessing nuanced and comprehensive knowledge of journals and publishing norms within their respective fields. Our rigorous selection and curation processes safeguard against the inclusion of untrustworthy sources in the collection. This unique commitment to nurturing both in-house human expertise and advanced technological development to maintain a trustworthy, comprehensive map of the world’s research literature requires focused investment.
“The Web of Science contains a remarkable treasure of data on scientific content, impact, and collaborations from 1900 to the present day on a global scale. Its comprehensive coverage has been an indispensable resource for the study of science, technology, and knowledge — enabling breakthroughs that would have been impossible without it…”
Transparency serves as a cornerstone of our organization
We empower the community to make informed decisions with confidence with the provision of our transparent, reproducible and high-quality curated data and analytics. We ensure that our editorial selection policies are publicly available and the methodology and data behind our indicators and metrics, such as the Category Normalized Citation Impact, are transparent and reproducible. Our experts at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) TM routinely publish and disseminate additional content on the introduction and interpretation of new indicators and the responsible use of metrics to ensure our approaches are understood and our results are replicable.
We understand that there is room and need for multiple perspectives, and we remain committed to partnering and engaging in on-going dialogue. We will continue to collaborate with the global research community, as no single approach nor single entity could address the most pressing issues facing research. Together, we can navigate the complexities of these challenges, united in our pursuit of advancing knowledge to transform our world.
