Index Copernicus was co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund under the name: "Electronic Publishing House of Scientific Journals system of Index Copernicus Ltd." IC's journal ranking system was criticized in 2013 by Jeffrey Beall because of the high proportion of predatory journals included in it and its suspect evaluation methodology; he characterized the resulting "IC Value" as "a pretty worthless measure". Index Copernicus Index Copernicus (IC) is an online database of user-contributed information, including scientist profiles, as well as of scientific institutions, publications and projects established in 1999 in Poland, and operated by Index Copernicus International. The database, named after Nicolaus
Northern Renaissance of European history. Many scholars see it as a unique time with characteristics all its own. A second group views the Renaissance as the first two to three centuries of a larger era in European history usually called early modern Europe, which began in the late fifteenth century and ended on the eve of the French Revolution (1789) or with the close of the Napoleonic era (1815). Some social historians reject the concept of the Renaissance altogether. Historians also argue over how much the Renaissance differed from the Middle Ages and whether it was the beginning of the modern world,