Charles W. Bailey, Jr., BMC's Impact Factors: Elseviers Take and Reactions to It, DigitalKoans, June 11, 2005. A useful compendium of BMC's press release, Elsevier's response, and comments by Bailey, David Goodman, Matt Cockerill, and Stevan Harnad. Bailey: 'Open access will rise or fall based on its demonstrated ability to significantly boost impact factors, and the battle to prove or disprove this effect will be fierce indeed.'
Comment. I'd only add that it's important to distinguish the citation impact of an individual article from a journal impact factor. The BMC-Elsevier debate is about the latter. But OA is more likely to rise and fall according to the former. Authors control the rate at which we move toward OA and they care more about the impact of their own work than the average impact of the authors who publish in the same journal.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/12/2005 11:41:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
