There is a prior question I think in the discussions about criteria for U Cal campuses etc. to use in evaluating what Elsevier journals to restore. This question ranges well beyond Elsevier journals. The question is: what are the "first principles" relevant to deciding what is a desirable stock of journals to maintain? Now is a good time to address this question. Time to recalibrate what titles are really needed. This could incrementally put downward pressure on the ridiculous expectations of the tenure and promotion system, which fuels the glut.

Considerations in answering this question:

--determine what journals have proved themselves over a long period of time, in terms of a stable trajectory of citations being made to those journals

--punish journals that show year over year price inflation in excess of some benchmark such as CPI, or a corrected "CPI" just for journals.

--impact factors are problematic for various reasons, one of which is that they are not a good proxy for the quality of specific articles published in them since a small proportion of articles in any issue buoy up the impact factor. A better basis is needed or at least a correction factor is needed to wash out this tendency. 

--definitely take into account faculty survey data as one consideration in the mix, but not the only one

--also, weight review journals very heavily because of their great value to scholarship

--correct for types of journals (for example, protocol journals) that might not see as many citations just because they're not the sort of thing people cite.

 

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