Unintended consequences of changes to Open Access and the Impact Factor | EMBO reports

"While the movement to OA has allowed progress to be made on breaching paywalls, it has triggered some unintended consequences. The new and evolving financial models threaten many journals from learned societies (Johnson and Malcolmson, 2024). That is a negative outcome as disciplines need to support their specialist areas and the best peer reviewing often comes from scientists committed to a society of like-minded researchers. However, a greater threat to the scientific endeavor has come from pop-up publishers who identified a new business opportunity from the combination of increasing OA and the decreasing relevance of IFs. Without IF as a guide, the name of the journal becomes largely irrelevant. In the absence of the Journal IF, an author-paid paper in a journal with low-quality standards is as visible and has the same legitimacy as one in a journal driven by high standards for its content....

The genie is out of the bottle. Reversing OA is no longer a feasible or desirable solution. The next step has to be marginalizing bad science and shady journals. In the absence of journal-based IFs, a system that focuses on the articles is needed. The Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) (Hutchins et al, 2016) provides a mechanism for time- and discipline-dependent citations to be calculated and could—and perhaps should—be tagged to papers that are part of grant or promotion assessments....

Applicants who inflate their CVs with ‘bought’ publications should not be seen as equivalent to those who subject their work to the highest standards of rigor...."