The following – true (!) – anecdote provides a nice example for what Peter Chen has called “subterfuge” in the cunning art of publishing, fully in line with René Schwarzenbach’s visions:

I think it’s almost 20 years ago when I noticed that a good colleague of mine, working in Australia, almost exclusively published his research in the Journal of Plant Physiology which was not considered to be a high-ranking journal although impact factors did not yet exist. I asked him why he did so, because I felt some of his work deserved placement in better journals. The answer was that his home University defined the amount of basic funding for his lab – amongst other criteria – on the NUMBER of published PAGES from his group.

To understand the logic, the reader must know that J. Plant Physiol. was still an A5-size journal around that time as compared with all the other, now standard A4-size journals.