Environ Health. 2010 Jul 8;9:35. doi: 10.1186/1476-069X-9-35.
Environmental Health has just received its first Impact Factor by Thomson ISI. At a level of 2.48, this achievement is quite satisfactory and places Environmental Health in the top 25% of environmental science journals. When the journal was launched in 2002, it was still unclear whether the Open Access publishing model could be made into a viable commercial enterprise within the biomedical field. During the past eight years, Open Access journals have become widely available, although still covering only about 15% of journal titles. Major funding agencies and institutions, including prominent US universities, now require that researchers publish in Open Access journals. Because of the profound role of scientific journals for the sharing of results and communication between researchers, the advent of Open Access may be of as much significance as the transition from handwriting to printing via moveable type. As Environmental Health is an electronic Open Access journal, the numbers of downloads at the journal website can be retrieved. The top-20 list of articles most frequently accessed shows that all of them have been downloaded over 10,000 times. Back in 2002, the first article published was accessed only 49 times during the following month. A year later, the server had over 1,000 downloads per month, and now the total number of monthly downloads approaches 50,000. These statistics complement the Impact Factor and confirm the viability of Open Access in our field of research. The advent of digital media and its decentralized mode of distribution - the internet - have dramatically changed the control and financing of scientific information dissemination, while facilitating peer review, accelerating editorial handling, and supporting much needed transparency. Both the meaning and means of "having an impact" are therefore changing, as will the degree and way in which scientific journals remain "factors" in that impact.
环境卫生期刊刚刚获得了汤姆森 ISI 的首个影响因子。该期刊的影响因子为 2.48，这一成绩令人相当满意，使环境卫生期刊位列环境科学期刊的前 25%。该期刊于 2002 年创刊时，开放获取出版模式是否能在生物医学领域成为可行的商业企业还不清楚。在过去的八年中，开放获取期刊已经变得广泛可用，尽管它们仍然只涵盖了约 15%的期刊标题。主要的资助机构和机构，包括著名的美国大学，现在要求研究人员在开放获取期刊上发表文章。由于科学期刊对于研究人员之间的结果共享和交流具有深远的作用，开放获取的出现可能与从手写体到通过活字印刷的转变一样重要。由于环境卫生期刊是一种电子开放获取期刊，可以检索到期刊网站上的下载次数。最常被访问的文章前 20 名列表显示，所有文章的下载量都超过了 10000 次。早在 2002 年，第一期发表的文章在接下来的一个月仅被访问了 49 次。一年后，服务器每月的下载量超过了 1000 次，现在每月的总下载量接近 50000 次。这些统计数据补充了影响因子，并证实了我们研究领域中开放获取的可行性。数字媒体及其分散的分发模式——互联网——极大地改变了科学信息传播的控制和融资方式，同时促进了同行评审，加速了编辑处理，并支持了急需的透明度。“产生影响”的意义和手段都在发生变化，科学期刊在这种影响中的作用和方式也将发生变化。
