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 [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=49028 or send a blank email to leave-49028-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
