You write: “these measures depart from time-honored computations of scholarly influence such as the journal impact factor”. Of course they do … any new measure must by definition depart from the old ones and as they are new they cannot be time-honored. And time-honored certainly does not mean “best possible ever” – Journal Impact Factors are also nothing else than a means to generate business and cannot be trusted. In fact I am quite doubtful that the journal impact factor tells anything about the quality of a single published article … I can take two my own articles as perfect example … both of them published in the same journal about a year apart … one cited by now nearly one hundred times, one exactly one time … but both with the same journal impact factor. Obviously one had impact and the other one not.
Yes, the field of publishing has become messy. Yes, it is much more difficult to evaluate the quality of any given article. But change from the slow, outdated, and extremely overpriced system of journal publications exactly the same way as 70 years ago (just also online), a system that robs the authors for their copyright and of any profit generated from their work while overcharging the readers and limiting access to publicly funded research results – is absolutely overdue.
Personally I think a way of publishing scientific research with non anonymous post-publication review – a way that generates a true dialogue of the authors with the questions readers have about the published research – should be very possible to achieve. It would free from the limitations of the peer review – where some anonymous reviewers clearly abuse their power and anonymity to block publication of research that goes against their pet hypotheses and theories. Open access, open discussion, no hiding behind anonymity … sounds very attractive to me.
