It is an emerging phenomenon, driven by the rapid increase in the number of scientists that scientific work needs to be evaluated on a competitive basis. Nowadays one can easily find accurate information about the journal impact factors and reference to these factors is considered a reliable way to evaluate scientific excellence. Nevertheless, absolute reference to the journal impact factors is not uniformly accepted. Steven Hyman, provost of Harvard University, commented on current measuring of scientific work in the recent “publishing in the new millennium” forum held November 9 at Harvard Medical School by saying that “we are measuring the wrong things very very well”. And Harold Varmus, Nobel laureate and former director of NIH, mentioned at the same forum two phenomena of scientific publishing, the Cell/Nature/Science (CNS) “disease” and the “impact factor mania”. In addition a newly founded journal, PLoS ONE, implements another strategy to evaluate scientific work disregarding its impact.

From the beginning of science up to the 70’s, scientists would publish their work without any major concern about the measuring of “impact” of the publication media. As the number of scientists increases competition drives the editorial broads of the ever increasing journals to accept the most influential research, the one that is or will become popular. On the other side of the coin, scientists will seek publications of high impact to out-compete their peers when applying for a job, tenure or funding. Academic appointment committees are selecting candidates from the bulk of the applicants based merely on publication records, which means the impact factors of the publications acquired. And there lies a mistake. The peer-reviewing process is the foundation of evaluation of scientific work. This is a consensus. But why doesn’t it form the absolute criterion of it? Why is the journal impact factor of the published work a main indicator of scientific excellence and not directly the reviews of scientific experts?
Charles G. Jennings a former executive director of Harvard Stem Cell Institute says on Nature (2006), doi:10.1038/nature05032: “It is common to bemoan the over-reliance on quantitative markers such as impact factors for assessing scientists’ abilities (and indeed there is much to bemoan), but until committee members have time to read every paper on every applicant’s CV, they will have to rely at least in part on proxy indicators.” In my opinion there can be effective proxy indicators, but journal impact factors are simply not ideal for that. Journal impact factors are related to the quality and novelty of the published work but they are not the most accurate measures for it. If the current trend continues the immense competition will lead to unfairness and arbitrariness in the scientific evaluation. What we need is a basis we can rely on; a unified reviewing system or an agency that will thoroughly, rigorously and objectively evaluate any given work to be published, using again specialized scientists as reviewers. Having an evaluation score from such an agency, scientists can include this score to their publication record. In addition, scientists can use the evaluation the reviewing agency provides and ask the journals to publish the evaluated work. If one journal is not interested, another one might be. Scientists will not loose their time to get into a new round of reevaluation and other scientists will not loose their time reevaluating a given work.

Can such a system work? I believe it can. NIH uses an evaluation score as a system to allocate funding. The cost of such a system is considerable; nevertheless it can be compensated by the cost of the editorial process. Martin Blume, an Editor-in-Chief of the American Physical Society at that time, wrote in the first of Nature Journals’ website (http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-
access/Articles/blume.html): “Peer review is expensive, and although reviewing by scientists is voluntary, we need to pay our editorial staff. It is more time consuming and hence more costly to review the 10,000 rejected articles than it is to review those that are accepted. Consideration is being given to other forms of peer review, but no savings are as yet obvious if quality is to be maintained.” As a proposed alternative, the cost of manuscript evaluation can be compensated by an equivalent reduction in the publication costs. If this is not enough, the scientists under evaluation or the government can compensate for the additional costs. The seeds for such an idea already exist. Cell press and PLoS journals now provide a small alternative: a scientist can get the reviews of a manuscript submitted to one their journals and forward them to the editors of another. In addition the Neuroscience Publishing Consortium introduced this past June in PubMed Plus Leadership Conference held in St. Louis will examine the feasibility of sharing reviews of submitted manuscripts within a group of journals that publish neuroscience papers. Nevertheless, such options would better serve the scientific community if they are not a privilege of a certain editorial press or consortium. Towards the same idea are the literature awareness tools “Faculty of 1000” (http://www.facultyof1000.com/) and “Science Watch & Hot papers” (http://scientific.thomson.com/products
/sw-hp/), which evaluate interesting and influential literature. Expanding this idea means to evaluate all the papers published. But it is much preferable if evaluation precedes publication.
As scientists, we have to reach to a point at which publication in high impact journals would still be preferable but not a “ticket” to scientific excellence. Let excellence in science be judged directly by the scientific experts without journals being the unnecessary and unwilling mediators in this process.