Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, June 21, 2008

Another OA journal grows in impact

Gunther Eysenbach, ISI/SCI Journal Impact Factors in Medical Informatics: Open Access Journal on Top, Gunther Eysenbach Random Research Rants, June 21, 2008.  Excerpt:

Yesterday, on June 20th, 2008, ISI/SCI released their 2007 Journal Citation Reports, reporting journal impact factors for the worlds' most important scholarly journals. The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) remains one of the most successful Open Access journals in the world *. For the second year in a row, JMIR came out as the #2 ranked journal in the medical informatics category (out of 20 journals). JMIR slightly improved its impact factor to 3.0 and has now almost the same impact factor as the leading medical informatics journal (JAMIA), whose impact factor dropped to 3.1. JAMIA is published by Elsevier and backed by an influential scientific society (American Medical Informatics Association), while JMIR is pretty much a one-man show on a shoestring budget. Anyone still not convinced about the open access advantage....

* When making this bold statement I am not talking about the absolute impact factor, but about the ranking within its subdiscipline. For example, PloS Med has obviously a higher impact factor (because general medical papers are more frequently cited than medical informatics papers), but is only ranked as #6 in its category "Medicine, General", whereas JMIR maintains its #2 rank in its category.