Elsevier chief: end citation fixation to halt ‘salami publishing’ | Times Higher Education (THE)

"Mr Chi said that when he joined Elsevier 14 years ago, he “saw that we were publishing a lot because that was a way to make more money, but that wasn’t really serving the long-term benefit of our company or the community of researchers”. Acting on that insight, he said, the publishing giant decided to publish fewer papers but of higher quality.

As a consequence, Elsevier “lost several percentage points of market share in those 14 years” but “gained about 25 per cent in the FWCI [field-weighted citation index], which means that we really raised the quality of the papers we publish”. 

While he stressed that he was “not at all against the goal of the open access model”, Mr Chi said that Elsevier’s emphasis on high-grade work in effect opened a publishing niche and “left others to fill the vacuum”, which they did by publishing “without the quality control” and sometimes “without peer review”. ..."