Genome Biology gets an impact factor

The open access journal Genome Biology recently received its first impact factor - 9.71. This puts it ahead of journals like Human Molecular Genetics and Oncogene. The publishers seem to be very impressed with this and have sent out letters to librarians advertising the journal's achievement. It does show that open access journals can achieve high quality (assuming that impact factors bear some relation to quality).

You might think this says something about whether open access journals lead to wider readership and citation of articles they publish, but it's not so clear. Genome Biology is an unusual OA journal inasmuch as whilst all original research articles are free-to-view online, their review articles, comments, opinions and meeting reports are only available to subscribers. Hence there is a bit of a know to untangle before any clear conclusion can be stated.

Genome Biology
Impact factors