When Clarivate Analytics acquired Publons on 1 June 2017, there was much interest in understanding if this would result in either an evolution and improvement, or commod- ification, of peer review. 1,2 The reason is because peer review tends to be exploitative, frequently extracting professional services, especially of peers and editors, for little or no monetary compensation while reaping record multi-billion dollar profits, 3,4 so it is expected that the services, tools, 5 and industries within and around academic journals and publishers also assume an exploitative nature. To compound this exploitative state, academia and academic publishing are currently experiencing a state of ‘fake’, including the abuse and fraud of peer review. 6,7 It was hoped that a tool developed by Clarivate Analytics would be successful in combatting fraud in peer review. c However, the tool has failed to do so and its metrics arguably show biases and problems, as has been found for other research evaluation indicators.
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