The importance of Scopus content certification

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 important aspects of the content curation done by Scopus and the CSAB is to certify the content that is included in the database. Only then content can be trusted and be used for the application it is intended for. Certification means that procedures are followed to ensure that content is selected according to certain policies and qualification standards.

Scopus selects (or certifies) academic journals (certifiers of research output) and therefore certifies the certifier. In that process Scopus needs to assess if the certification, or peer-review process applied by the journal is sound and meets the quality criteria. Peer-review comes in many different flavours such as double blind, single blind or open peer-review. Scopus is open to any of these forms and the type of peer-review does not determine the quality of peer-review per se. However, what procedure is followed and who executes it, is important.

In academic journal publishing, the Version of Record marks the end of the editorial and publishing process and is also known as the definitive, authorized, formal, or published version of an article (NISO). An article in Version of Record stage will include any editorial improvements such as copy editing, typesetting and improvements as part of the peer-review process. Therefore, the Version of Record is a guarantee that the article has gone through the entire peer-review, or certification process.

The editorial oversight of the journal, usually an Editor-in-Chief or a (Section) Editor, is responsible for deciding if the peer-review process is complete. Based on input from reviewers, the Editor decides if the research fits the journal, is scientifically sound, is authentic and free of research integrity concerns and where applicable comments and recommendations from the reviewers are addressed and therefore the article is approved (certified) for publication in the journal.

If a journal is selected for Scopus, it covers all articles, also if this journal is for example publishing negative results or work that would have been rejected and unpublished otherwise.  Scopus does not interfere with the content and certification decisions of individual articles, as long as the articles have gone through the entire publishing and peer-review process and thus the certification fully consistent and complete.     

The coverage of eLife in Scopus

eLife is an independent nonprofit committed to improving the way research is reviewed and communicated. 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 in communication with eLife to get verification of our understanding of the model and to clarify our positioning.

The changes to the elife publishing model that were implemented at the beginning of 2023 include: 

• All papers will be published as Reviewed Preprints; 
• No accept/reject decision is made at the end of the peer-review process; 
• The decision on what to do next (such as revise and resubmit, or to declare it as the final Version of Record) will entirely be in the hands of the author. 

In this model there is no guarantee that with the Version of Record the article has gone through the entire peer-review process and that where applicable comments and recommendations from the reviewers are addressed. That is because in the curate step, declaring the article as Version of Record is in the hands of the author self and not the (editorial oversight of the) journal. With that we find that the certification in the current model of eLife is not fully consistent nor complete.

Scopus, in consultation with the CSAB, concludes that eLife does not fit the criteria and definition of a journal in Scopus anymore and the following decisions were made.

• eLife will be taken out of the Scopus journal collection and will no longer be included in journal metrics and rankings.     
• eLife content will continue to be indexed by moving it to the Scopus preprint collection. That means all eLife content will remain discoverable in Scopus as preprints and the items will be attributed to the respective Scopus author profiles as preprints. Note: Preprints do not contribute to any existing Scopus metrics of the main (journal) collection of published content.   

Although eLife introduced the new model at the beginning of 2023, not all articles processed and published since then have gone through the new model. Therefore, the cut-off to transfer eLife to the preprint collection will be publication year 2024. All eLife articles with a publication year of 2023 and earlier will remain in Scopus as part of the journal collection.  This content will also remain to be applied to the eLife journal profile and its metrics.