Open access publisher BioMed Central has become a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), the commitment to move away from a single measure of a journal's impact (Impact Factor) to the provision of a wider set of metrics and measurements. BioMed Central has been compliant with the majority of DORA recommendations for some time, and a commitment to reducing emphasis on Impact Factor is the final step in enacting DORA practices in research assessment.
DORA recognises 'a pressing need to improve the ways in which the output of scientific research is evaluated by funding agencies, academic institutions, and other parties.' Hundreds of other organisations, including institutions and publishers, have already signed DORA.
DORA recommends reducing emphasis on the journal impact factor as a promotional tool, ideally by ceasing to promote the impact factor or by presenting the metric in the context of a variety of journal-based metrics that provide a richer view of journal performance. The declaration further suggests making available a range of article-level metrics to encourage a shift toward assessment based on the scientific content of an article rather than publication metrics of the journal in which it was published. Further, it encourages responsible authorship practices and the provision of information about the specific contributions of each author.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a world-leading provider of Abstracting & Indexing (A&I) Services, Knowledge Modeling Services (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies), Metadata Enrichment & Entity Extraction Services.
