Scopus

The move is aimed at providing an alternative to commercial, pay-to-access bibliographic databases such as the Web of Science and Scopus, which aggregate metadata, such as author affiliations and funding sources, from scholarly papers.

Some of the best known databases, such as the Web of Science and Scopus, are proprietary and offer pay-to-access data and services supporting these and other metrics, including university rankings and journal impact factors.

Elsevier, which runs Scopus, says it has long backed open initiatives and welcomes “any projects that support research as we share the same goal.”

Scopus, a widely used database of scientific papers operated by publishing giant Elsevier, plays an important role as an arbiter of scholarly legitimacy, with many institutions around the world expecting their researchers to publish in journals indexed on the platform.

For some of those journals, Scopus had listed hundreds of papers.