A Letter to STC from Julian Davies

Bravo Randy Schekman!

I strongly support your comments on the tyranny of "impact factors" and I will be pleased to join in efforts to prevent the misuse of these ratings.  

Impact Factors have become a symbol of terror for scientists in all disciplines and their use in promotion and other such decisions should be strongly discouraged. Consider the landmark papers leading to the Jacob and Monod operon model published in a house journal! This could not happen today, but why not? 

I would like to start a journal that has zero impact factor, I will call it the "ZIP Journal of Microbiology". "ZIP"stands for "Zero Impact Publication". I hope that great discoveries will not be downgraded because they were published in what are now low-impact journals!

Yours in disgust!

Julian

Julian Davies is Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia, Fellow of the Royal Society, and a former President of the American Society for Microbiology.

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Comments

[bks]

A somewhat related, cross-disciplinary discussion in an academic linguistics blog:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=9174

--bks