Dear all,
The EU has launched an initiative supporting Open Science, based on the conviction that for science to be useful for society, it has to be transparent and accessible. It has created an Open Science Monitor (OSM) to gather data/metrics meant at guiding policy making on this topic. Now, it has appointed Elsevier as a sub-contractor on the OSM... which is rather shocking when you remember how strongly opposed Elsevier is to open science (like when they patented peer-review...). Here's a nice comment article on this topic:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2018/jun/29/elsevier-are-corrupting-open-science-in-europeThe reason why I am bringing this to your attention is that the EU is collecting feedback on the metrics they intend to use for the OSM, until August, 31st, 2018. I can only urge you to login to the website below and to voice your ideas about these metrics:
https://www.makingspeechestalk.com/ch/Open_Science_Monitor/You will see that Elsevier is basing most of its proposed metrics, totally or partially, on its own products (Scopus, Mendeley, Plum Analytics). In other words, imagining that Elsevier has a specific agenda for Open Science, it is in the perfect position to alter its own records to support its agenda. For instance, a proposed metric is "Scopus publications that are Open Access". If Elsevier wanted to claim that OA is not widely adopted, they could simply stop referencing OA articles... Nowhere is such conflict of interest acceptable, and as a scientist, such observation-bias makes me cry inside...
Cheers,
-Etienne
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Etienne Gaudrain, PhD
Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon - CNRS UMR 5292
Université Lyon 1
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