Alberto_Pepe
Co-Founder | Authorea

Hi kerovon, thanks for the question. The infamous Impact Factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular period (e.g last 5 years). As such, it's an important metric in the publishers' world. Nature, Cell, Science, all have very high impact factors, and scholars are pushed to submit their 'best' research to these journals. In fact, having an article published in one of these prestigious journals can make the difference between getting tenure or not. This said, research published in a high impact factor journal is not necessarily 'better'. It is usually research that appears groundbreaking and potentially has a broader reach, but not always. Also, to make the paper fit the tight format of a high impact journal, scholars are usually forced to cut down important details, often making their science hard to reproduce. Conversely, an important finding that was not published in a high-impact factor journal might be overlooked, cited less and have smaller immediate reach on the community (which is busy reading the high impact factor journals). My impression is that open repositories (like the arXiv and Authorea) can allow a much more democratic assessment of the importance of a research article, without the need for the existence of an impact factor. The impact of paper should not depend on the impact factor of the journal that decided to publish it, but only on the quality and importance of the science it contains.