A leading French university has cancelled its contract with a commercial provider of academic data to switch to a non-profit rival, boosting a growing movement to make research available for free.
From January 1, the Sorbonne will work with OpenAlex, a recently developed service offering free online access to search and analytical tools for academics’ publications, after dropping its longstanding partnership with Web of Science, owned by UK-based Clarivate.
The action is part of a wider pushback against the current model in academic publishing, where researchers publish and review papers for free but have to buy expensive subscriptions to the journals in which they are published to analyse data relating to their work. Thousands of researchers have turned to open-access platforms in recent years.