Right. Impact factors are a pretty objective metric. While the journals covered in a citation index are a matter of editorial discretion, that's not really wher

Right. Impact factors are a pretty objective metric. While the journals covered in a citation index are a matter of editorial discretion, that's not really where the problem is. For example, the Web of Science sold by ThomsonReuters indexes many high impact journals that are published by its competitor Elsevier. If a journal consistently gets lots of citations, all the major citation indexes will include it, no matter if its open access, or published by a competitor's company. If they neglected to, their citation products would become useless and the company would lose subscribers to the indexes that did a better job.