Are we happy with the impact factor?

No abstract available! (Published: 23 October 2014) Citation: European Journal of Psychotraumatology 2014, 5 : 26084 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/ejpt.v5.26084


EJPT in WoS
In December 2013, the European Journal of Psychotraumatology (EJPT) was accepted in WoS, and the first impact factor (for 2013) was expected in June 2014. Belonging to the 10% of journals accepted into WoS, EJPT had proved that it had high ''scientific quality.'' However, when the Journal Citations Report came out this summer, EJPT was missing. After inquiry at Thomson Reuters, we were told that the volume of EJPT papers was very high and that they had not managed to create the citation reports in time. In March 2014, Thomson Reuters should have indexed all papers published in EJPT from the start of the journal in 2010 through 2013, but they were not and therefore EJPT will have to wait until June 2015 to get its first official impact factor.
Luckily the impact factor is quite easy to calculate. In any given year, it is calculated by counting all citations during one year to a journal's content published in the preceding 2 years, divided by the number of substantive, scholarly items published in those same 2 years (Garfield, 2006 For EJPT, the 2013 unofficial impact calculation is slightly above 2 (see www.ejpt.net). Considering that the journal has only existed for 3½ years, we are quite pleased with that score.

Transitions in science and new metrics
Open Access is politically supported in many countries as well as on a European level (see here for EU Open Access policy initiatives). The European Commission requires that by 2016 at least half of the scientific publications, the research of which it funds, must be published under an Open Access model*freely available to anybody, anywhere. This is also what Sander Dekker, the Dutch State Secretary for the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, announced on June 7, 2014 (in Dutch) ''Science is in need of fundamental reform.'' It is hard not to agree. Science in Transition is a strong movement in the Netherlands with broad political support, challenging many aspects of science. ''Science has become a self-referential system where quality is measured mostly in bibliometric parameters and where societal relevance is undervalued'' say the founders of the movement (Dijstelbloem, Huisman, Miedema, & Mijnhardt, 2013).
Times are changing. Although ISI/Thomson Reuters have succeeded in setting a standard, it lacks the kind of refinement in a new globalized world where many other ways of measuring impact are possible and should also be accounted for, and for which authors should be credited. Rather than measuring the journal's impact, which may unfairly depend on one or a couple of much-cited articles and the rest with no citations at all, identifying an PSYCHOTRAUMATOLOGY EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ae European Journal of Psychotraumatology 2014. # 2014 Miranda Olff. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC-BY 4.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to remix, transform, and build upon the material, for any purpose, even commercially, under the condition that appropriate credit is given, that a link to the license is provided, and that you indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. author's impact (article level metrics, or altmetrics) is now becoming a more and more important alternative to the impact factor (see also Olff, 2013). Altmetrics cover not just citation counts but also other aspects of the impact of an article such as how many data and knowledge bases refer to it, article views, full-text downloads, Facebook likes, or mentions in social media and news media. Click on this article from the 2013 volume of EJPT, for example, and see what it may look like.
As regards the EJPT, we certainly cannot afford to undervalue its societal relevance, and*at the same time*we will have an impact factor next year!