DORA Gets It All Backwards
DORA goes off the rails in worrying over eLife, and it's plain silly
The recent decision by Clarivate to suspend indexing of eLife articles — and eLife’s loss of an Impact Factor for 2025 — seems a reasonable step for an organization that sets standards around its own index inclusion criteria. After all, the model eLife has embraced is transgressive, exploitable, and simply irresponsible. And worrying about a lost Impact Factor for an organization that has stated it “has never supported the Impact Factor” seems absurd.
Yet, leave it to DORA to go all-in on smearing Clarivate in the way only the self-righteous can — by labeling it “commercial” in progressive academic code intended to raise hackles and suspicions, as if all “commercial” organizations are nefarious, lack values, or make their profits illegitimately. This is part of a rather bizarre rant that has small self-owns accumulating, revealing DORA’s selfish interests and internal incentives for eLife’s indexing to continue uninterrupted.
Such shrill pearl-clutching over eLife’s self-inflicted wound — and a wound they profess to care little about — is a nice throwback to the more innocent era of OA activism, when advocates were beautifully oblivious to how they sounded like petulant children throwing tantrums in the grocery store aisles,
Today, it’s less interesting, as the OA child in question is well into its 30s and should be mature enough to understand the world and accept consequences for its choices. But it’s still entertaining enough: