Changes may be coming for the "universities Bible", aka Times Higher Education, and its rankings, events, consultancies and so on.
It seems that TES Global is selling off its very lucrative cash cow and that, in addition to private equity firms, the RELX group which owns Scopus and Clarivate Analytics are in a bidding war.
Scopus currently provides the data for the THE rankings and Clarivate used to. If one of them wins the war there may be implications for the THE rankings, especially for the citations indicator.
If anybody has information about what is happening please send a comment.
Hi Richard
ReplyDeleteSee http://higheredstrategy.com/the-future-of-rankings-is-excellent/
The end goal here is laudable: that any institution in the world should be able to get high-quality comparable data about similar institutions around the globe which can help it benchmark and improve its performance. We’re still decades away from this. Developing this kind of data on topics other than research takes a lot of time and a lot of conversations. But the trend is now moving in this direction much more quickly than it was even a couple of years ago.
Reaching this final goal will mean jumping one last hurdle: making the data more or less open. There’s an obvious case for doing so: right now, institutions just give THE their money, which THE then turns around and sells to institutions for a hefty fee. I don’t think this monopoly will last forever, and suspect that institutions outside the OECD, which can’t afford THE’s fees, may lead the way in creating some kind of open repository of ranking data. (Equally, some kind of open, common data set such as the one which exists in the US may also arise because too many rankers want the same data and institutions will get tired of dealing with them all). This may not happen overnight, and if the THE’s business model is ever destroyed this way we’ll lose a major innovator in the field, but I do believe it will happen in the long run.
Bottom line: globally, the rankings discussion is finally reaching a level of sophistication which makes more interesting discussions possible. In the past, rankings have had a lot of pernicious effects on higher education; I’m a lot more optimistic about the role they will play in the future.