In my spam folder this morning I found an email from Nature Publishing Group (NPG) that made me seriously doubt my previous assessment of NPG as possessing a "very keen awareness [...] about scholarly communication and where it is headed". Just see for yourself:



This emphasis on Thomson Reuter's 'Impact Factor' seems rather embarrassing given that

• The IF is negotiable and doesn't reflect actual citation counts (source1, source2)
• The IF cannot be reproduced, even if it reflected actual citations (source)
• The IF is not statistically sound, even if it were reproducible and reflected actual citations (source)

and NPG's flagship journal Nature itself has been rather critical of IF on numerous occasions. Apparently, science stops where money-making starts - one more reason to wean ourselves from corporate publishers for our scholarly communication.