The use of impact factors in the evaluation of researchers has contributed to the distortion of scientific publishing practices and, in turn, of research practices. Dictating the rules of the game for the assessment of researchers by defining the prestige and attractiveness of journals is "a reductive view of science that we should no longer be condoning. This means we have to take action now to guarantee the quality and the ethics of the research assessment system" said Alain Schuhl, the CNRS's Deputy CEO for Science.

The CNRS began this process in 2024 by unsubscribing from Elsevier's Scopus database and is pursuing its policy today by cutting access to Web of Science (WoS) of Clarivate Analytics' bibliometric database. Thus, CNRS researchers are now encouraged to turn to open databases like OpenAlex. This offers a greater level of visibility for non-English-language journals and a larger number of journals than the WoS which was considered to be insufficiently representative for several disciplines.

Source https://www.cnrs.fr/en/update/cnrs-breaking-free-web-science