Status slide for top journals

“Since 1990 the top 10 per cent of most cited journals have lost a 4 per cent of most cited papers, declining to 52 per cent. While this trend does not destroy the dominance of elite journals the finding is significant for the open access movement, which seeks to end the monopoly of the large commercial publishers that restrict access to publicly funded research to paying customers. One of the publishers’ major arguments for their business model is that scholars’ reputation and readership improves by publication in the best-regarded journals. They use statistics showing journal impact factors to make their point, based on citations of all articles and journals published over two years... Lozano and his colleagues write... ‘Researchers now consider IFs when choosing their publication outlets; journal; editors formulate policies explicitly designed to improve their IFs, and publishers advertise IFs on their web sites.’ However, Lozano’s team found the connection between citations of a research paper and where it is published weakened over the last 20 years, as researchers began to access papers electronically instead of reading them in print editions... ‘Using these open-access repositories, experts could find publications in their respective fields and decide which ones are worth reading and citing, regardless of the journal,’ they predict. They base their conclusion on an analysis of data from Thomson Reuters Web of Science, covering medicine plus natural and social sciences for 110 years to 2011, involving 29 million papers and 800 million citations... as more important papers increasingly appear in more diverse venues it will become even less justifiable to automatically transfer a journal’s reputation and symbolic capital on to even its most recently published papers. ‘This should force a return to direct assessments of paper quality, by actually reading them,’ the authors argue. ‘Knowing that their papers will stand on their own might also encourage researchers to abandon their fixation on high IF journals. Journals with established reputations might remain preferable for a while, but in general, the incentive to exclusively in high IF journals will diminish,” he suggests. Science will become more democratic; a larger number of editors and reviewers will decide what gets published and the scientific community at large will decide which papers get cited independently of journal IFs.’”