Article visibility: journal impact factor and availability of full text in PubMed Central and open access

Both the impact factor of the journal and immediate full-text availability in Pubmed Central (PMC) have featured in editorials before. In 2004, the editor of the Cardiovascular Journal of Africa (CVJA) lamented, like so many others, the injustice of not having an impact factor, its validity as a tool for measuring science output, and the negative effect of a low perceived impact in drawing attention from publications from developing countries. Since then, after a selection process, we have been indexed by the Web of Science ® (WoS) and Thomson Reuters (Philadelphia, PA, USA), and have seen a growing impact factor. In the case of PMC, our acceptance to this database was announced in 2012, 2 and now we are proud that it is active and full-text articles are available dating back to 2009. The journal opted for immediate full open access (OA), which means that full-text articles are available on publication date for anybody with access to the internet. The impact factor is one measurement of visibility of articles in specific journals and is more appropriately called the journal impact factor (JIF). It was originally developed by Eugene Garfield as a help to librarians in selecting journals to which to subscribe. 5,6 However, it acquired iconic status as a single measure of the quality of science published in a journal and by extension, the scientific standing of authors, affecting, among others, grant allocation and career advancement. The classic JIF is defined as the ratio of the number of cites in a given year as a ratio of the number of 'citable' articles published in the previous two years. Information comes from the approximately 11 000 journals indexed by the WoS, which is published in the Journal Citation Report ® (JCR). 5,6 Cites, counted in the numerator, can be from any type of article from journals within the database, whereas only articles designated as research or review count in the denominator. Factors that can be correlated with the JIF have been much researched and debated. To name but a few, the country of the journal and its socioeconomic status, 7 the field of publishing, number or reviews versus original research articles, and the effect of a blockbuster article. The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) with a JIF of 52.658 (JCR 2012) and then Lancet with a JIF of 39.060 (2012) are probably the world's most read medical journals. South Africa's …