PLoS ONE gets listed in Web of Science and will get its impact factor (IF)

Some good news for the Open Acess-movement in general, and for those who have published in PLoS one in particular, particularly Tom Gosden and Fabrice Eroukhmanoff (alongside with me): PLoS ONE will now be listed in Web of Science, meaning that your articles, as well as all future articles in this journal, will now be searchable and appear in ISI:s databases. This is very good news, as the lack of inclusion by PLoS ONE in ISI has been somewhat negative when trying to convince people to publish there: scientists are quite conservative and hesitant to publish if they are not absolutely confident that their papers will be read widely and cited.

It does not matter to argue, in my experience, that Web of Science, is not the only database and not necessarily the best or most inclusive one. PubMed, for instance, is much faster and better, and Scopus covers many more journals than WoS. Many scientists do not seem aware of the fact that these search engines and data-bases are commercially driven, and thus not driven and organized by scientists, with the primary goal of helping scientists. Thompson/ISI simply happen to be one of the oldest data-bases, and the one which claims credit for the term "Impact Factor"(IF), and very questionable measure of journal impact which has recently been criticized by many.

Putting these issues against IF aside for a moment, PLoS ONE will, as a side-effect, soon also get its first IF, since it was needed to be included in ISI before that was possible. It will of course also be interesting to see which IF PLoS ONE will get, although I would not primarily use that as the only or most important criterion where to publish. It is interesting that it took three years before ISI accepted to include PLoS ONE in their data-bases, given that there are many low-impact journals like Odonatologica which has long been included in ISI.

I suspect, although I do not have any proof for this, that ISI are nervous for the new publication model that PLoS ONE advocates, where perceived impact and "novelty" is played down and there is more emphasis on technical quality. In the end, this might hurt the commercial interests of ISI if scientists start to increasingly become more critical to journal-level IF:s (rightly so!). In a better future, there will hopefully be more emphasis on scientific content and article-level metrics of authors, rather than on journal-level metrics, which largely belongs to the pre-internet era and sends out a message that journals like (say) Evolution or American Naturalist are not as important as we, in the field of evolutionary biology, generally think that they are.

PLoS launches new campaign on Article Level Metrics (ALMS)

As many of you are aware of, I am quite critical of the "Impact Factor"-hysteria when it comes to journals. It is very weird, I think, that an article's importance should be measured by where it was published. To be sure, there is a correlation between the Impact Factor (IF) of a journal, and the number of citations of the average article there (per definition), but the correlation across all articles is at most moderate (around 0.5, if I remember correctly).

This high variance means that many individual "low-impact"-papers are regularly published in "high-impact"-journals like Nature and Science. These papers receive few citations, many of them fewer citations than papers published in more specialist journals in our field such as Evolution or American Naturalist.

Clearly, something is wrong here. Should a person who is lucky to get a paper in to Nature, but which is not cited a lot, be offered a job or a research grant, while a competitor who have published a much more cited article in a "normal" journal not get the job? Clearly not, if you ask me. What should matter, ultimately, is the citation rate and importance of individual or articles or authors, not journals.

This is where I think scientific assesment will move in the future. We can think of, for instance, the increasing use of the "h-index" to evaluate individual scientists, which seems to replace the length of publication lists or the journals where people have published as a criterion to decide who are the "best" scientists. The general message should be: try to publish fewer, but better papers, because you will be evaluated as an individual and there are no shortcuts or easy ways of cheating these new measures.

Along these lines, the new and rapidly growing OA-journal PLoS ONE has just launched a campaing for Article Level Metrics (ALMS). The staff at PLoS ONE hopes that these new measures, which includes per-article performance measures such as citation rates, number of downloads, coverage in media and the bloggosphere, inlinks and other measures of "importance" will outcompete old-fashioned journal Impact Factors (IF:s). IF:s are increasingly subject to criticisms, and I would not hesitate to call them old-fashioned and yesterday's hat.

Just as the "h-index" quickly became popular and established itself as a new evaluation tool of individual scientists and their performance, ALMS will hopefully also contribute to deconstruct and remove the "monopoly" of IF:s and the naive use of them by hiring agencies. The journals that should worry most about this should be the traditional high-IF journals like Nature and Science. Their whole existence and high prestige has been built more or less solely on the absurd IF-system, and if starts cracking down, their future might be in jeopardy and they can certainly not take anything for granted. Here you can follow a "Webinar" where the Editor of PLoS ONE (Peter Binfield) explains more about ALMS.