Journal impact factors and the future of open access publishing

Abstract

In the history of academic publishing, there may not have been a more drastic philosophical and foundational change than the one from conventional printed communications to online dissemination.With this change in platform comes a host of economic and ethical transformations.This development leads those involved in publishing to re-evaluate the meaning of journal impact factors (JIF), the value of open access (OA), and the budgetary consequences of these changes.We must also consider how we can still incorporate equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) into our scientific publishing process.This editorial will discuss some of the history of these topics and describe the implications for JACMP. JOURNAL IMPACT FACTORSIn 1955, Eugene Garfield published a paper in Science in which he proposed a methodology for tracking and assessing scientific publications.1 The idea was to let scientists evaluate how their work was received and allow historians to assess the importance of these articles.2 With time, it evolved into collating the number of citations per journal, which eventually became the modern journal impact factor.Today, Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Cancer are publications with some of the highest JIFs depending on the year.Journals routinely display their high impact factors proudly, hoping to invite submissions based on this number alone, implying enhanced benefit and reward to authors.Criticisms of JIF are multiple: it can encourage self -citation, it can be skewed by a highly cited article, 3 it is calculated by data not readily available to the public and has been described as "crude and misleading." 4 Interestingly, all of these assessments were made by the editors of, or editorials published in Nature.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.