PhysMath Central Blog
From Bill Hooker's blog:
Science Online '09 is less than a week away, and I'm going to be co-moderating an unconference session with Björn Brembs, the theme of which is "Open Access publishing: present and future".
Björn has already put some notes up on the wiki, and there's an interesting contribution from Antony Williams of Chemspider. As both Björn's and Antony's notes make clear, we think the future of Open Access (indeed, all scholarly) publishing will feature prominently the long-overdue death of the Impact Factor. In fact, audience willing, we plan to use some of this session as a sort of preface for Björn's Sunday session with Peter Binfield, which is titled "Reputation, authority and incentives. Or: How to get rid of the Impact Factor".
It's difficult to overstate the extent to which that single figure has come to dominate scholarly and administrative decision making: where to publish, who to fund or promote, which candidate to hire, and so on. It's also difficult to overstate how bad an idea it is to put so much weight on a single journal-level metric derived by undislosed calculations and decisions from a proprietary database.
Read the article in full - and let Bill know your thoughts.
Personally I think OA will simply make it easier to construct new metrics which are much more transparent and therefore inherently superior to proprietary impact factors.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:02 Comments (0)