Thomson Reuters, described as "a major multinational mass
media and information firm" according to Wikipedia (see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_Reuters ) and owner
of "major intellectual property and Science" resources (including
Web of Science and related citation services), has sold its
intellectual and science assets to a couple of "private equity"
funds. Nature has a news item on the sale and quoting from it:
|The deal, according to an announcement on 11 July, will
|transfer the division to private equity funds affiliated with
|Onex Corporation, based in Toronto, and Baring Private
|Equity Asia, headquartered in Hong Kong. But industry
|observers expect that the new owners will later break up
|the division and resell its parts for a profit.
http://www.nature.com/news/web-of-science-to-be-sold-to-private-equity-firms-1.20255?WT.ec_id=NEWSDAILY-20160713
It is unclear how this will affect the "Web of Science" and
the "Journal Citation Reports" because these assets are
referred to in the article as "cash cows". The new owners
may leave these assets alone, they may continue to develop
citation services to make them more useful to the scientific
community, or they might just bleed it dry under the assumption
they don't have to improve it because they appear to be the
only "real" game in town (long timers who remember the old
word processing software Wordstar will see the analogy:
the owners of Wordstar, running on the CP/M operating system,
didn't do anything to improve or update it significantly when
MS-DOS took over the PC world and WordPerfect would eat
its lunch which in turn would get bludgeoned to near death by
Microsoft Word).
Maybe Web of Science will get improved, then again maybe
we all will need to learn more about Scopus and Mendelay
and other services (I'm not exactly sure where Google Scholar
fits into this picture). Just make sure you know your h-number,
g-number, and all the other citation index numbers and how
they're calculated because they're probably going to play a
bigger role in faculty evaluation, especially at research
institutions.
-Mike Palij
New York University
m...@nyu.edu
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