Quality not quantity: measuring the impact of published research

"As the nation’s medical research funding body, we at the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) mandate that all publications from research we’ve funded be openly accessible. We and the government’s other key funding organisation, the Australian Research Council, are flexible on how it’s done, as long as the paper is made available. Researchers may opt for 'green' self archiving, where they publish in a restricted journal and archive a freely available version, or “gold” access, which allows readers to freely obtain articles via publisher websites. Most Australian medical research publications will be available through university repositories and by researchers submitting to journals with copyright agreements that support the NHMRC open access policy. The university librarians have been especially helpful in ensuring that the institutional repositories are ready for this revision to the policy. Initiatives such as PubMed Central (PMC) and European PMC are also making it easier to access published research. Consumer groups want direct access, as soon as possible, to the findings of research – after all, they pay for it through taxes and donations to charities. This information helps in a time when we’re bombarded with health messages of sometimes dubious origin and where vested interests are often not disclosed. In 21st century medical research, consumers and patients group members are often integrally involved in the research itself and are important messengers between researchers and the community ... The open access movement is having a significant impact too on how we measure the impact of scientific research.  For too long, the reputation of a journal has dominated publication choice – and the reputation has been mainly determined the journal impact factor. This metric reflects how frequently the totality of a journal’s recent papers are cited in other journals.  The journal impact factor dominated how universities, research institutes and research funding bodies have judged individual researchers for many years. This has always been a mistake – the importance of any individual paper cannot be assessed on the the citation performance of all the other papers in that journal. Even in the highest impact factor journals, some papers are never cited by other researchers.  The NHMRC moved away from using journal impact factors in 2008. So it was good to see the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which has now been signed by thousands of individual researchers and organisations, come out with such a strong statement earlier this year ... "