This is being offered despite Stevan's being "braced for the predictable next round of attacks on scientometric impact analysis: 'Citation impact is crude, misleading, circular, biassed: we must assess research a better way!'". It remains curious why he acquiesces passively to a poor, biassed system based on impact analysis rather than searching for "alternative, nonscientometric ways of assessing and ranking large bodies of research output" - and indeed seeks to dissuade those who might be doing that.
Those of us working with developing country journals are well aware of the inherent biases and vicious circles operating in the world of impact factors. The circularity Stevan refers to is "You cannot cite what you haven't read, you tend not to read what is not stocked in your library (or readily avaialble online), and your library tends not to stock what isn't cited". This certainly applies to developing country journals, and there is literature to support this (which - paradoxically - I don't have to hand to cite), but it also applies everywhere to new journals, local journals and many open access products. Surely those supporting open access should be against impact-factor driven ranking systems and be searching actively for less-biassed replacements? These need not be "nonscientometric", incidentally - no need for the suggestion of witchcraft. [Impact factors themselves are more than a tad sociometric - measurements of the behavioural patterns of researchers - rather than entirely objective. Is the reason someone cited the British Medical Journal rather than the Bhutan Medical Journal (assuming she had access to both) because the first BMJ was better, or more prestigious, than the second BMJ?] In fact, Stevan mentions "other new online scientometric measures such as online usage ["hits"], time-series analyses, co-citation analyses and full-text-based semantic co-analyses, all placed in a weighted multiple regression equation instead of just a univariate correlation". Indeed, impact factors are very crude quasi-scientometric and subjective measures compared even with such simple information (easy to obtain for online media) as counts of usage - for example, how many articles have been read but not cited? All these are indeed worth pursuing and, I would have thought, right on the agenda of the OA movement. Chris Chris Zielinski Director, Information Waystations and Staging Posts Network Currently External Relations Officer, HTP/WHO Avenue Appia, CH-1211, Geneva, Switzerland Tel: 004122-7914435 Mobile: 0044797-10-45354 e-mail: zielins...@who.int and informa...@supanet.com web site: http://www.iwsp.org