The Scopus team is proud of our transparent selection process and independent review board. The international experts on our Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB) continually review new titles using both quantitative and qualitative measures. Since the establishment of the CSAB in 2005, Scopus has continuously collected review data as part of the content curation process.
One of the most important aspects of that content curation is the certification process, which ensures that you can trust the content you find in Scopus. We like to say that our process “certifies the certifier.” In other words, when we select (or certify) an academic journal — which is in turn certifying research output through a peer-review process — we need to assess if the journal’s process is sound and meets quality criteria.
There are many different types of peer review, including double-anonymized reviews, single-anonymized reviews and open reviews. Scopus is open to any of these forms — we don’t believe that the type of peer review determines the quality of peer review. What is important are the procedures that a journal follows and who executes them.
In academic journal publishing, an article’s version of record is the definitive, formal, published version. It marks the end of the editorial and publishing process. (See NISO’s definitions of journal article stages for more information.) An article in this stage includes any editorial improvements such as copy editing, typesetting and peer-review coordination. Therefore, the version of record is a guarantee that the article has gone through a journal’s entire certification process.
The person responsible for the editorial oversight of the journal, usually an editor-in-chief or a section editor, decides when the peer-review process is complete. Based on input from reviewers, the editor decides if the research fits the journal; if the article is scientifically sound, authentic and free of research integrity concerns; and that applicable comments and recommendations from the reviewers have been addressed. If so, the article is approved (certified) for publication in the journal.
When a journal is selected for Scopus, that selection covers all the journal’s articles. Scopus does not interfere with the content or certification decisions of individual articles if the articles have gone through the entire publishing and peer-review process, meaning the journal’s certification is fully consistent and complete.
eLife is an independent, nonprofit open access journal and publisher in the biomedical and life sciences. We are aware of the current discussion about eLife and its indexing status. Scopus has been monitoring eLife since the changes to its publishing model were announced, and we have been communicating with eLife to verify our understanding of the model and to clarify our positioning.
At the beginning of 2023, eLife made these changes to the eLife publishing model:
In this model there is no guarantee that the version of record has gone through the peer-review process and that applicable comments and recommendations from reviewers have been addressed. Because the author, and not the journal’s editorial oversight, declares the article as the version of record, Scopus believes that eLife’s current certification model is not fully consistent or complete.
Therefore, after consulting with the CSAB, we concluded that eLife does not fit the criteria and definition of a Scopus journal. We made the following decisions:
Although eLife introduced the new model at the beginning of 2023, it has not published all articles since then under the new model. Therefore, eLife articles with a publication date of 2024 and after will be transferred to the preprint collection. All eLife articles with a publication year of 2023 and earlier will remain in Scopus as part of the journal collection and will be applied to the eLife journal profile and its metrics.
