Authoritarian control of research bibliometry in the EU

• As of 2019, scientists in much of the EU, and in particular Poland, are forced to use bibliometry databases run by private subcontractors owned by private corporations that respond to the market, not to academic/intellectual standards:
  • "Web of Science" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_Science - as of 2019 is owned by Clarivate Analytics which is owned by Onex Corporation WikipediaEn:Onex_Corporation ($31 billion in assets as of 2019 according to the Wikipedia page) and Baring Private Equity Asia WikipediaEn:Barings_Bank#Aftermath (about which no information is known in the English language Wikipedia).
  • "Scopus" owned by Elsevier, which as of 2019, has a rather bad academic reputation: WikipediaEn:Elsevier#Academic_practices
• How seriously can we trust the academic standards of corporations of which one seems to be secret (Baring Private Equity Asia) and one has a bad academic reputation? Bibliometry decisions lie at the core of our system of organising knowledge in the sense of scientific/academic research.