Sir

Peter A. Lawrence's suggestion (Nature 422, 259–261) for removing the politics from publication is that the well-established scientists should get together and stop over-valuing papers in popular journals. It will be a chilly day in hell before all the older scientists agree to change anything, much less something that currently benefits many of them. A different approach would be more realistic.

The urge to publish in well-known journals is often driven by money. Senior scientists seek top papers to ease the passage of their grants. Search committees are worried about making a huge investment in young scientists, so they seek top papers as a guarantee of future fundability. Tenure and promotions are strongly influenced by the funding that a candidate has managed to raise. The bodies that give grants usually love impact factors as a supposedly quantitative measure of the quality of science. This has inevitably led to overvaluation of the top journals themselves, rather than the science they contain.

We should therefore target the organizations that give grants, rather than hoping to persuade senior scientists to change their behaviour. If funding agencies set out to reward good science, as opposed to politically successful publications, then the distorted importance of the top journals would be lessened. Of course, productive scientists must be rewarded, so different criteria for achievement would be needed.

My action plan would be to persuade funding bodies to stop using journal impacts entirely, once applicants have been working independently for a few years. Instead, they should ask their referees to answer two questions. First, have this person's published papers been influential to the field? Have they provided the foundations for further discovery, or changed people's perceptions? Or were they predictable or (worse) incorrect? Second, is the applicant's newly published work likely to be influential in this way? Grant bodies have an advantage over journal editors in that they can judge papers retrospectively.

Answers of this sort would not remove the problem completely, as a high-profile paper would always carry better visibility than one in a little-read journal. However, explicit instructions to avoid impact factors — and instead concentrate on the value of past research — could only help to redress the balance.