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The move is aimed at providing an alternative to commercial, pay-to-access bibliographic databases such as the Web of Science and Scopus, which aggregate metadata, such as author affiliations and funding sources, from scholarly papers.

Some of the best known databases, such as the Web of Science and Scopus, are proprietary and offer pay-to-access data and services supporting these and other metrics, including university rankings and journal impact factors.

Elsevier, which runs Scopus, says it has long backed open initiatives and welcomes “any projects that support research as we share the same goal.”

These ersatz publications represent a tiny fraction of the more than 26,000 active, peer-reviewed journals indexed in Scopus.

Elsevier has already removed 13 journal homepage links from Scopus, he says.