For sure impact factor is one of the biggest curse for scientific research but it shows the bitter truth about scientific community as well. Top 2 most visited blog posts on my blog are about impact factor, including the most visited blog post Citation Trend Line For PLoS Journals. Majority of visitor came here by goggling “PLoS One + Impact Factor” or “PLoS + Impact Factor”. I am not a big supporter of impact factors, but I can hardly bear the hypocrisy surrounding the impact factor game. Recently PLoS has decided to stop promoting journal impact factors on their sites all together. In recent PLoS Journal blog post Mark Patterson writes

As for the impact factor, the 2008 numbers were released last month. But rather than updating the PLoS Journal sites with the new numbers, we’ve decided to stop promoting journal impact factors on our sites all together. It’s time to move on, and focus efforts on more sophisticated, flexible and meaningful measures.

Ok, this is a good initiative, indeed it needs to have balls (I am sorry to say but person who is going to publish he needs the balls not the publisher). In my opinion (which hardly anyone cares) it will not stop others to go on Thomson Reuters Web of Science website and check the impact factor for PLoS journals or visit blogs like the one I have. The impact of this announcement could have been more larger and pronounced if the PLoS management have disclosed this earlier, before the 2008 impact factors were released last month. I guess like every one else PLoS was expecting that may be Thomson Reuters will give very first impact factor for their cash cow PLoS One, but at the end Thomson Reuters has not assigned an impact factor to PLoS One for undisclosed reasons. If they really don’t believe in the impact factor game then they should demolish all other journals in PLoS family making PLoS One only premier journal because PLoS One has already broken all barriers for discipline specific journals, I don’t know what they are waiting for. Also why not stop Thomson Reuters from indexing PLoS content at first place. This decision does not reflect the strong will of PLoS management, it just tells us that PLoS is no different from other learned societies such as ACS and others which started with a agenda to strengthen the scientific communication and end up as cash machinery. I will again reiterate that impact factors are no good for science but the people who are criticizing this game have competitive interests which means they are not fare. Like impact factor their intentions are skewed. For example there are people, no matter what they write about impact factor at the end like everyone else given the chance they will still publish with high impact journals.