The Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) publishes the Leiden Ranking of universities and plans to launch a new ranking in 2024 that is entirely based on open data.

On September 7th, Ludo Waltman, the deputy director of the CWTS, revealed at an event in Paris on university rankings that using open data could help solve several current problems. He highlighted ongoing debates on the relevance and scope of rankings of higher education and research establishments. He also underlined the need for rankings to take a multi-dimensional approach when assessing such institutions.

In this context, he announced an experiment that is underway at his own research centre involving using only open data in the future. The historical classification system based on proprietary data will be used alongside the new experimental classification system for a while. The advent of open data and metadata is a fairly recent development and the consolidation of data and methods on the international stage is an ongoing process.

This announcement dovetails with the ambitions that drive Open Science policies and is particularly in line with the June 2022 conclusions of the Council of the European Union which: “INVITES the Member States, the Commission and stakeholders to promote independence, openness, reproducibility and transparency of the data and criteria necessary for research assessment and for determining research impacts; CONSIDERS that data and bibliographic databases used for research assessment should, in principle, be openly accessible and that tools and technical systems should enable transparency”.