Abstract

The current ease of online publishing has led to an excess of e-journals, all struggling to attract manuscripts and to survive, and most often without success. This fragile situation for journals means that when one of them does climb up in the quality rankings it is likely to be absorbed by a large foreign publisher. The article reflects on the academic world's dependence on international commercial databases, and questions the Spanish government's expenditure on subscriptions to them. Finally, a recent campaign conducted against Elsevier is described.

Abstract

Research, its management and its policies represent a major effort for Spanish universities but few of these institutions have a scientific information system with bibliometric indicators for decision making. Aware of this gap, Elsevier has launched Scival. It is a web platform intended to assess institutions through maps and indicators calculated from the Scopus database. In this article we review this new product. We first describe the scientific basis of the platform that is based on the works of Klavan and Bojack about co-citation maps of science and the identification of paradigms. Secondly we describe its interface and its utilities, paying particular attention to the so-called Wheel of science. Finally, we discuss some critical aspects of Scival