Report: “Web of Science Index Puts eLife ‘On Hold’ Because of its Radical Publishing Model”

From Science:

The Web of Science, a leading bibliometric indexing service, yesterday suspended the journal eLife from its listings because the novel publishing model adopted last year—which includes public peer review but no final decision whether a manuscript is accepted or rejected—conflicts with Web of Science’s standards for assuring quality.

The move could jeopardize eLife’s journal impact factor (IF), the controversial metric—determined annually by Clarivate, Web of Science’s parent firm, based on average citations to a journal’s papers—that is widely used as a proxy for quality.

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Still, eLife’s management said it is disappointed by Clarivate’s decision. “[It] stifles attempts to show how publishing and peer review can be improved using open science principles, and instead gives the appearance of ongoing support for established and ineffective publishing models that have needed to change for so long,” they wrote in an online statement. Clarivate has not identified any eLife reviewed papers as lacking in quality, says Damian Pattinson, the journal’s executive director.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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