Not our mother tongues, either.
You think the language is really the bottleneck?
For master’s level?
Yeah.
One advice that I would also give when I meet a university president, I say, "Can you stimulate international collaboration?" It seems to be really...
Countries like Switzerland and my own country the Netherlands, we have loads of international collaboration, of course. We are a bit smaller, so that also forces you. Taiwan is not that huge, either. You see that they do very well within the impact as well.
Exactly. You’re very, very close. Here, we have another graph where you see an interesting correlation. Here again, you see the field-weighted citation impact versus international collaboration.
Very good. How is Taiwan doing? We have all the data compared to other countries. Taiwan is in the top 20. It’s number 20.
That’s not always the case in all countries, right? [laughs]
It’s a start, and this implies that your policies are based on scientific evidence. [laughs]
Perfect.
Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs?
Absolutely.
It’s reflected in the legislation. We’re trying to explore that, but it’s very tricky to really follow that path in a way and then really link policy with research.
That’s academic-corporate collaboration. That’s are easy. For instance, it would also be very interesting for you do research and at some point -- say, in environmental studies -- you shape a new environmental policy.
Yeah, but here the one is mostly the articles which are published by, say, a researcher at a university and a researcher in industry.
No, actually those are articles which are...
We’re actually thinking very hard to develop better metrics, also because we get this demand from the universities and the funders. An easy one is economic impact. We can make this link between articles and patents.
Exactly, and that’s where most of the discussion takes place.
I can double-check.
No, but certainly the social media is there, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I don’t know all the blogs. That might be more difficult to get a good overview.
That’s a good one.
It’s called Plum Analytics.
Certainly, it’s the social media as well.
I think it’s both.
It’s a bit of a proxy. [laughs]
Yep. We don’t do teaching performance. We don’t have that information.
Launch event.
Look at the QS World University Ranking. We provide all the citations, so it’s 20 percent. They also use the Scopus database to find the right people to write for the academic reputation. This is kind of a questionnaire. Weiwei’s going to tell you about the very specific ranking we ...
Here, we provide the data for two rankings. Take, for instance, Times Higher Education Ranking. They have this weighted impact of teaching, research, citations, international outlook, and industry outcome. In that, big chunks are provided by Scopus.
I’ll skip all the Chinese, but I’m sure it makes sense to you.
I already mentioned Scopus. It extract the information from 5,000 publishers, certainly not only Elsevier. Then we have this analytic solution, SciVal, which is based on Scopus.
Yeah. It goes back actually a century, so there’s lots of information there. Knovel is also something in the engineering space which we acquired.
All engineering.
It’s a specific collection of data, which start mostly around publications and the citation database for engineers.
Here, to provide this insight, we have the more analytical solutions. You see a little bit like an evolution going from content to platforms to insights.
Exactly. We see here on the bottom, we provide the right content, journals and books, a drug database. We also have the right platforms. We already mention Scopus. There’s been Mendeley. It’s a bit of Facebook. You probably have heard of Mendeley. SSRN, this is for the pre-print, which started ...
In Elsevier in Taiwan, how many people work here?
Exactly. We’re active in most of these more technical communities. We want to stay with the right standards as well, and also contribute to developing some of the standards.
Some of the things we do specific for the datasets. It’s linking from articles to the datasets and repositories. We have our own data repository.
Excellent. You see also that it’s used a lot. People find it and they download it and cite it.
That’s great.
And the right to search.
Exactly.
It depends on the field. In our own field, astrophysics, we do a pretty good job. Within chemistry, they’re still struggling at the bottom of the pyramid, so to say. We are developing and we have developed solutions for all these different parts. I’m not saying that we’ve solved everything, ...
It’s accessible. They can discover it. You can cite it. You understand it. It has some kind of quality seal that is reviewed. You can reproduce it. It’s also that you can reuse it. This is a bit like where we want to work towards.
Quite active also in managing research data. I don’t know if you know this approach. This is a bit on Nirvana, successful data management. Today, we are already lucky in certain disciplines if data is stored. Sometimes, it’s not even stored let alone preserved.
When you’re a doctor, we don’t say go and read articles or search for articles. We will try to give you the answer you need to when you’re next to the patient.
This is a bit of the transformation, very high level. Before we were a publisher and we just said, "Here it is. Go and read it." We invested very much like search for exactly the right information. Now, we want to give advice and do the right thing, answer questions.
