Here is a very nice summary of the history of PLoS, the origins and rationale behind PLoS ONE and its approach to scientific review and publishing, and some information about new article-level metrics designed to more objectively assess the “impact” of individual articles.
some excerpts:
PLoS believes that the journal in which an article is published should not be the primary mechanism to determine whether that article will have any worth. Instead, PLoS feels that each article should be evaluated based solely on its own contribution to the literature (and not on some halo effect due to being published in the company of other high-quality articles).
…
While of some utility as a predictive measure of the average impact of a journal, the Impact Factor has been widely misused to the extent that the careers and grants of many academics are influenced by the Impact Factor of the journals they have published in, and some academics are strongly discouraged from publishing in certain journals unless they have an Impact Factor. Moreover, because of the widespread adoption of the Impact Factor and the fact that a journal with an Impact Factor is liable to enjoy more subscriptions and receive more high-quality submissions as a result, journals and journal publishers have an incentive to promote the Impact Factor due to the potential content- and finance-related benefits that follow. Hence, the system is perpetuated by a combination of academia’s adoption of a poor measure and the industry’s support for that measure because of the commercial benefits it brings.
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Although the Impact Factor is widely adopted within academia it is well understood that measurements of this type, applied at the journal level, are far from ideal when attempting to evaluate the scientific contribution of individual articles, or by inference, individual academics.
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Read the full article by Peter Binfield, managing editor PLoS ONE, [ here ] – it’s a good read.
Updated: also see a video of a talk by Peter Binfield on article-level metrics [ here ].
PLoS believes that the journal in which an article is published should not be the primary mechanism to determine whether that article will have any worth. Instead, PLoS feels that each article should be evaluated based solely on its own contribution to the literature (and not on some halo effect due to being published in the company of other high-quality articles).
Posted by Paul 