CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: open research europe scopus

  • OpenAlex: The Case for Open Research Metrics

    OpenAlex is a free, CC0-licensed index of more than 319 million scholarly works, authors and institutions, built by the non-profit OurResearch to replace the discontinued Microsoft Academic Graph. For institutions weighing research-metrics platforms, its open data answers a question closed commercial indices cannot: who can audit the numbers behind an assessment decision.

    OpenAlex is a bibliographic catalogue of scientific papers, authors and institutions accessible in open-access mode, named after the Library of Alexandria. That single design choice — publishing the full dataset under a public-domain licence rather than behind a subscription wall — is what separates it structurally from Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivate’s Web of Science, and why it has become a reference point in debates about research-assessment transparency.

    What Is OpenAlex?

    OpenAlex launched in January 2022, built by OurResearch (a US non-profit operating as Impactstory, Inc.) as a successor to the Microsoft Academic Graph, which Microsoft stopped updating on 31 December 2021. The project inherited MAG’s dataset and rebuilt it as an open, queryable graph of works, authors, institutions, funders, and topics.

    Two design decisions define the platform. First, the entire dataset is released under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence, meaning any institution, developer, or researcher can download, redistribute, and build on it without permission or cost. Second, OpenAlex has formally adopted the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), a governance commitment covering sustainability, community control, and data portability.

    The scale is now substantial. OpenAlex’s own catalogue reports more than 319 million scholarly works, and its API handled roughly 115 million queries a month in 2024, according to figures cited in the platform’s Wikipedia entry. It draws source data from Crossref, ORCID, DOAJ, and Unpaywall rather than from a closed editorial pipeline.

    How Does OpenAlex Compare with Scopus and Web of Science?

    The practical difference is not just price — it is what each platform lets an institution verify. Scopus and Web of Science apply proprietary, selective journal-inclusion criteria and sell access to the resulting index. OpenAlex indexes broadly by default and publishes the inclusion logic as open code, which means an institution can inspect exactly why a work is or is not counted.

    Dimension OpenAlex Scopus (Elsevier) Web of Science (Clarivate)
    Governance Non-profit (OurResearch), POSI-aligned Commercial publisher Commercial data company
    Data licence CC0, fully open, bulk download Proprietary, licensed access only Proprietary, licensed access only
    Core journal metric No proprietary journal metric CiteScore (four-year citation average) Journal Impact Factor
    Coverage approach Broad, automated aggregation, strong Diamond OA and non-English coverage Curated, selective journal list Curated, selective journal list
    Cost to institutions Free API; optional paid support tier Subscription Subscription

    CiteScore, Scopus’s flagship journal metric, averages the citations a journal’s documents receive over a four-year window — a useful signal, but one calculated entirely inside a closed system that institutions cannot independently reproduce. OpenAlex does not publish an equivalent branded journal score; instead it exposes the underlying citation and work-level data so that any bibliometrician can calculate their own indicator and show their working.

    Coverage differences matter for equity as much as accuracy. A 2024 study cited in OpenAlex’s Wikipedia entry found the platform indexes more than 12,500 Diamond Open Access journal titles, including over 60% of Diamond OA journals absent from both Web of Science and Scopus — a direct consequence of not gating inclusion behind a commercial selection committee.

    Why Does Open Metrics Infrastructure Serve DORA’s Transparency Principle?

    The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), first published in 2012, asks funders, institutions, and publishers to stop substituting journal-based proxies for direct evaluation of research and to be explicit about the criteria used in funding, hiring, and promotion decisions. That explicitness requirement is where the platform choice stops being neutral.

    A closed index can tell an institution that a number was calculated a certain way, but it cannot let that institution independently verify how, because the underlying citation graph is licensed, not published. An open metadata layer removes that opacity: the same dataset an institution cites in a tenure file or a funding report can be downloaded, re-run, and checked by anyone, including the researcher being assessed.

    Adoption evidence has followed the argument. Leiden University announced in September 2023 that it would produce an open-source edition of its CWTS Leiden Ranking using OpenAlex data from 2024 onward. Sorbonne University announced in December 2023 that it was withdrawing its Scopus subscription in favour of OpenAlex. In 2024, France’s Ministry of Higher Education and Research pledged financial support to the project, describing it as “crucial open science infrastructure,” and the Arcadia Fund awarded OurResearch a $7.5 million grant explicitly to build OpenAlex into a sustainable alternative to commercial citation indices.

    • Leiden University: open-source CWTS Leiden Ranking edition built on OpenAlex data (from 2024)
    • Sorbonne University: Scopus subscription withdrawn in favour of OpenAlex (December 2023)
    • French Ministry of Higher Education and Research: financial commitment to OpenAlex as open science infrastructure (2024)
    • Arcadia Fund: $7.5 million grant to OurResearch for OpenAlex sustainability (March 2024)

    None of this means closed indices lack value; their curated selection and mature analytics tooling still suit some high-stakes evaluations. But where the explicit requirement is transparency rather than convenience, an auditable, CC0-licensed data layer meets DORA’s stated principle more directly than a licensed black box.

    Common Questions About OpenAlex

    What is OpenAlex used for?

    Universities, funders, and publishers use OpenAlex to track publication output, measure open-access status, benchmark institutional performance, and feed alternative rankings such as the open-source CWTS Leiden Ranking. Its free API also underpins third-party dashboards, systematic-review tools, and research-information systems that need citation and affiliation data without a subscription fee.

    Is OpenAlex legit?

    Yes. OpenAlex is maintained by OurResearch, a non-profit with a multi-year record of building open scholarly infrastructure, and it has formally adopted the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). Its data and methodology are openly licensed and auditable, and the platform is already cited in peer-reviewed scientometrics research, including a 2022 arXiv paper by its founders.

    Is OpenAlex free?

    Yes. The full dataset is released under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) public-domain licence, and the REST API can be queried without a subscription, unlike Scopus or Web of Science. A polite-pool rate limit applies to unauthenticated use, and OurResearch offers an optional paid support tier for high-volume institutional queries.

    Who owns OpenAlex?

    OpenAlex is created and maintained by OurResearch, a US-based non-profit operating as Impactstory, Inc., not by a commercial publisher. Governance sits with a mission-driven organisation rather than a shareholder-owned company — the structural distinction that underpins its CC0 licensing and its appeal to institutions pursuing publisher-independent, DORA-aligned metrics.

    What Should Institutional Leaders Do Next?

    Platform choice is now a governance decision, not just a procurement one. An institution that cites OpenAlex data in a promotion case, a funding report, or an open-access dashboard is making a transparency claim as well as a metrics claim, and that claim should be tested before it is relied upon.

    • Map which existing assessment workflows (tenure, funding reports, rankings submissions) rely on a metric an evaluator cannot independently reproduce.
    • Pilot OpenAlex alongside — not instead of — existing subscriptions, comparing coverage gaps directly against Scopus or Web of Science outputs for your own institutional corpus.
    • Document data provenance explicitly in assessment criteria, consistent with DORA’s requirement for stated, auditable methodology.
    • Track POSI-aligned infrastructure commitments (OpenAlex, CrossRef, ORCID, ROR) as the durable layer beneath any commercial tool an institution also chooses to license.

    Open, non-proprietary metadata will not replace every function a commercial index performs today. But as funders and assessment reformers keep pressing for auditable evidence over proprietary scores, institutions that already understand — and can reproduce — their own metrics will be the ones best placed to defend them.

  • Field-Weighted Citation Impact: Where It Fails

    Field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) is a Scopus-derived metric that divides a publication’s actual citation count by the citation count expected for similar documents in the same subject field, publication year and document type — a result of 1.0 marks the global average, above 1.0 marks above-average impact. Before an institution builds review, promotion or tenure (RPT) criteria around it, the underlying normalisation assumptions need scrutiny.

    Field-weighted citation impact is defined by Elsevier as the ratio of citations actually received by an output to the citations that would be expected based on the average for the global scientific output of the same subject field, publication year and document type. It is calculated using Scopus data and surfaced through SciVal and Pure.

    What is field-weighted citation impact?

    Field-weighted citation impact is a normalised, article-level citation metric built into Elsevier’s SciVal and Scopus platforms. It expresses how a specific output, author, or institution has been cited relative to a global benchmark of comparable publications, rather than in raw citation counts that inevitably favour older papers and citation-heavy fields such as biomedicine.

    An FWCI of 1.48 means a document has been cited 48% more than expected for its field, year and type. An FWCI of 0.6 means it has been cited 40% less than expected. Because the benchmark is fixed at 1.0 by construction, roughly half of all outputs in any given field will sit below that line — a distributional fact that is frequently lost in institutional reporting.

    How is FWCI calculated?

    The field-weighted citation impact formula is simple on its face: FWCI = actual citations received ÷ expected citations for similar documents. The “expected” figure is the average citation count for all Scopus-indexed documents sharing the same Scopus subject classification (ASJC code), publication year, and document type (article, review, conference paper, and so on).

    • A microbiology article published in 2023 that has received 20 citations, against a field average of 10 for similar 2023 microbiology articles, scores an FWCI of 2.0.
    • A humanities article with 3 citations against a field average of 2 scores an FWCI of 1.5 — a superficially similar score built on a far smaller, more volatile citation base.
    • SciVal aggregates FWCI across an author’s or institution’s full output set by summing actual citations and expected citations separately, then dividing the totals — not by averaging individual FWCI scores.

    This matters: a single highly cited outlier can lift a whole portfolio’s FWCI, which is why SciVal documentation recommends reading FWCI alongside output volume and citation distribution, not as a standalone score.

    FWCI vs CiteScore and the Journal Impact Factor

    FWCI is often confused with journal-level metrics because all three numbers look similar — a decimal hovering near 1 to 10. They measure different things at different units of analysis, which is the first source of misapplication in policy documents.

    Metric Unit of analysis Field-normalised? Source and window
    Field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) Article, author, or institution Yes — field, year, document type Scopus data via SciVal; typically a rolling multi-year citation count
    CiteScore Journal No Elsevier/Scopus; launched December 2016; citations in a year to the prior 3 years of documents
    Journal Impact Factor (JIF) Journal No Clarivate Journal Citation Reports; historically a 2-year citation window

    Neither CiteScore nor the JIF adjusts for subject field, so comparing a mathematics journal’s CiteScore to an oncology journal’s compares citation cultures, not quality. FWCI’s field normalisation is what DORA-aligned reformers have asked journal metrics to do and mostly do not — which is also why FWCI is sometimes waved through review committees as the “responsible” metric without further scrutiny.

    Where FWCI breaks down: five assumptions to scrutinise

    FWCI’s field normalisation is a genuine improvement over raw citation counts and journal-level proxies, but it inherits several assumptions that DORA-aligned institutions should test before writing it into criteria.

    • Mean-based benchmarking, not percentile-based. FWCI compares an output to the field average, but citation distributions are heavily right-skewed: a small number of highly cited papers pull the mean upward, so most papers structurally score below 1.0 even when performing typically for their field. This is precisely why the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University uses percentile-based indicators, such as the share of a unit’s output in the global top 10% most-cited, in its Leiden Ranking methodology rather than a mean-normalised ratio.
    • Subject classification is assigned to journals, not articles. Scopus’s ASJC subject codes are largely applied at the source-title level. An interdisciplinary article published in a broad-scope journal inherits that journal’s field classification, which can misrepresent the “expected” citation benchmark for a genuinely cross-disciplinary piece of work.
    • Small-sample volatility. For low-citation fields (much of the humanities, parts of engineering and mathematics) or for single articles, a difference of one or two citations can swing FWCI dramatically, because the expected-citation denominator is itself small. A score of 2.0 built on 20 citations is far more stable than one built on 2.
    • Self-citation is not excluded by default. Author, institutional, and journal self-citation inflate the numerator unless a self-citation exclusion is explicitly applied — a configurable option in SciVal, but one that is easy to omit when scores are pulled into a spreadsheet for a committee.
    • A single number cannot represent research quality, originality, or societal value. FWCI measures citation uptake within a fixed window; it says nothing about methodological rigour, reproducibility, data sharing, or the qualitative judgement DORA asks assessors to exercise in its place.

    Should FWCI drive review, promotion and tenure decisions?

    The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), issued in 2012, recommends that institutions not use journal-based metrics as a surrogate for the quality of individual articles, individual researchers’ contributions, or as inputs to hiring, promotion, and funding decisions. FWCI’s article-level, field-normalised design addresses DORA’s specific objection to journal-level proxies such as the JIF — but it does not exempt FWCI from DORA’s broader principle that quantitative indicators should supplement, not replace, expert reading of the work itself.

    Institutions building RPT criteria around FWCI should require committees to read the underlying subject classification applied to a candidate’s outputs, check whether self-citations are excluded, and treat single-digit-citation scores as statistically unstable rather than definitive. A candidate’s FWCI trend across a full portfolio, read alongside narrative evidence of contribution, is a materially more defensible signal than a single score cited in isolation.

    As UK Research and Innovation and equivalent funders continue to align assessment frameworks with responsible-metrics principles, institutions that document how they weight FWCI against qualitative peer judgement — rather than adopting it as a pass/fail threshold — will be better positioned to defend their research administration processes to auditors, funders, and appeals panels alike.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is the average FWCI?

    The global average FWCI is always 1.0 by mathematical construction, because the benchmark for “expected citations” is itself the average of comparable outputs. A score above 1.0 indicates above-average citation performance for that field, year, and document type; a score below 1.0 indicates below-average performance.

    How do I get my field-weighted citation impact?

    FWCI is retrieved through a SciVal subscription, where institutional users can search an author, publication set, or institution and view the FWCI directly on the metrics dashboard. Some institutions also surface FWCI through Pure, which synchronises the metric from Scopus on a scheduled basis where the integration is enabled.

    What is field-weighted citation impact ranking?

    FWCI is not itself a ranking system — it is a ratio, not a percentile or league-table position. Institutions sometimes rank authors, departments, or outputs by their FWCI scores internally, but this practice inherits all the mean-based and small-sample limitations described above and should be treated cautiously.

    Is field-weighted citation impact the same as CiteScore?

    No. FWCI operates at the article, author, or institution level and is field-normalised; CiteScore is a journal-level average citation rate with no field normalisation. A journal’s CiteScore says nothing about how any single article within it actually performed relative to its field.

    FWCI remains one of the more defensible citation metrics precisely because it was built to correct the field-blindness of journal-level indicators. Its value depends entirely on institutions applying it the way its own documentation recommends: alongside output volume, subject classification checks, and self-citation controls — not as a solitary number standing in for expert judgement in a promotion file.

  • Open Research Europe Impact Factor & Indexing

    Open Research Europe has no official Clarivate Journal Impact Factor (JIF), and by explicit policy it never will. The European Commission’s open-access publishing platform for Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 beneficiaries deliberately rejects journal-level metrics in favour of article-level indicators, aligning itself with the DORA Declaration and the Leiden Manifesto.

    Open Research Europe (ORE) is a no-fee, open-access publishing platform launched in 2021 by the European Commission, built on F1000-derived publishing infrastructure, that carries Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020-funded research through an author-driven, post-publication open peer-review process. That structural choice — publish first, review openly afterwards — is precisely what makes the “impact factor” question harder to answer than a simple yes or no, and it is why ORE’s Scopus listing and its absence from Web of Science are so often confused with each other.

    Does Open Research Europe Have a Journal Impact Factor?

    No. Open Research Europe has never held a Clarivate Journal Impact Factor and has stated it will not pursue one. The COST-ORE webinar Question and Answer document is unambiguous on this point: “Open Research Europe does not have an Impact Factor (IF) and will not have one in the future.” This is a design decision, not a shortfall — ORE is structured around article-level metrics rather than a single journal-wide citation average.

    Some third-party indexing directories nonetheless display a figure they label an “impact score” or “Impact IF” for ORE, often citing a value around 1.4–1.9. These figures are not the Clarivate JIF. They are derived from Scopus citation data by commercial indexing-metrics sites, and they should not be quoted on a CV or grant application as a Journal Impact Factor, because no such official figure exists for ORE.

    What Does Scopus Indexing Mean for ORE Articles?

    Scopus indexing means an ORE article has cleared enough of a quality bar — completed open peer review, stable versioning, sustained publication activity — to be catalogued in Elsevier’s abstract-and-citation database. Per LIBER Europe’s ORE FAQ, articles are included in Google Scholar immediately on publication, but are only picked up by Scopus and Inspec once they pass peer review.

    Scopus coverage delivers three concrete benefits for authors:

    • Discoverability — articles surface in the citation searches institutions and publishers run by default.
    • Evaluator recognition — many national assessment exercises and promotion committees treat Scopus coverage as a baseline quality signal.
    • Citation tracking — Scopus data feeds the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), the metric ORE actually reports in place of a JIF.

    According to SCImago Journal & Country Rank (data as of March 2026), ORE sits in the Q2 quartile of the Multidisciplinary category for 2023, 2024 and 2025, with an SJR of 0.391 in 2025 — up from 0.280 in 2023.

    Is Open Research Europe Indexed in Web of Science?

    As of mid-2026, Open Research Europe is not indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science (WoS) core collection, though WoS inclusion is a stated ambition for the platform. This matters directly for the impact-factor question, because Web of Science coverage is the prerequisite Clarivate requires before it will calculate a Journal Impact Factor for any title.

    In practice, this means ORE’s absence from WoS and its absence of a JIF are the same fact stated two ways: no WoS record, no JIF eligibility. Researchers who need WoS-indexed output for a specific funder or national assessment requirement should verify ORE’s current WoS status directly before submitting, since indexing applications are described by ORE itself as ongoing.

    Why Does Post-Publication Peer Review Complicate the Comparison?

    ORE publishes an article before formal peer review begins, then runs an open, invited, named-reviewer process afterwards — authors must nominate at least five potential reviewers and keep sourcing names until two reports are published. Each revision produces its own version with its own DOI, so a single ORE article can exist as multiple citable, indexable records.

    LIBER Europe’s FAQ flags a genuine downstream problem this creates for librarians and indexers: databases that ingest every version risk flagging near-duplicate records for removal, while databases that keep only the latest version may lose citation history from earlier versions. This versioning mechanic — not just the absence of a JIF — is a structural reason why ORE resists being scored on the same axis as a conventional subscription or hybrid journal.

    How ORE’s Citation Data Compares, Year by Year

    Article-level growth is the metric ORE wants evaluated, and the underlying Scopus-sourced data shows a platform still scaling rather than a mature, steady-state journal.

    Year Documents published SJR Total cites Cites per document
    2022 117 — 87 1.554
    2023 151 0.280 247 1.428
    2024 196 0.376 532 1.642
    2025 221 0.391 899 1.938

    Source: SCImago Journal & Country Rank, metrics based on Scopus data as of March 2026.

    One further data point exposes a common misreading. SCImago’s Journal Value tool models an “estimated APC” for ORE of roughly $2,742 for 2025, calculated purely from its SJR and output volume. That figure is a statistical estimate, not a real charge: under LIBER Europe’s FAQ, ORE authors pay nothing, because the European Commission covers all publication costs directly for eligible Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 beneficiaries. Treating the modelled APC as an actual fee is a documented source of confusion worth correcting explicitly.

    Common Questions About ORE’s Impact Factor and Indexing

    Does Open Research Europe Have an Official Impact Factor?

    No. Open Research Europe has confirmed it does not have, and will not seek, a Clarivate Journal Impact Factor. It reports article-level indicators — citations, views, downloads and reviewer reports — instead, consistent with the DORA Declaration and the Leiden Manifesto on responsible research assessment.

    What Is Open Research Europe?

    Open Research Europe is the European Commission’s open-access publishing platform for research funded under Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe and Euratom. It offers rapid, no-fee publication across 14 article types and six discipline areas, with an open, post-publication peer-review process.

    Is It Good to Publish in Open Access Platforms Like ORE?

    For eligible Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 beneficiaries, ORE satisfies open-access and data-sharing mandates at no author cost while granting Scopus and Google Scholar discoverability. Researchers needing Web of Science-indexed output for a specific funder requirement should confirm current coverage before submitting.

    Implications for Authors, Institutions and Evaluators

    Research offices and evaluators should treat ORE’s metrics profile as a feature of the platform’s design, not a data gap to be filled in with an unofficial number. Institutional guidance to authors should explicitly state that quoting a scraped “impact score” for ORE on a grant application or CV is inaccurate, since no Clarivate JIF exists.

    Research administration teams responsible for tracking funder compliance and output reporting are better served citing ORE’s Scopus indexing status, SJR quartile and article-level citation counts — the same figures ORE itself publishes on every article’s dedicated metrics page.

    Outlook: What Happens Next

    The European Commission confirmed in a 26 March 2026 announcement that it is entering “a new era for Open Research Europe,” committing to continued funding for the platform and exploring its expansion to serve funders beyond the EU research programmes, potentially under a broader diamond open-access model with no author-facing fees. Whether that expansion brings a change to ORE’s metrics philosophy remains an open question, but nothing in the Commission’s public statements to date signals a reversal of the no-JIF policy. Institutions tracking ORE for compliance or assessment purposes should monitor the platform’s own indexing page directly, since Web of Science status and any future database applications are updated there as they are achieved.