"Smart publishers (both toll- and open-access) and open-access repositories report article download numbers for articles online, because that's another number, and numbers have a hypnotic effect on the psyche." - Daniel Mietchen

"Has anyone else cottoned on to the potential disruptive force of the article-level measurement? Why, yes, as a matter of fact PLoS has! (Genius move, PLoS, by the way. Kudos.) I can't imagine that BMC and Hindawi and others of the gold-open-access ilk won't follow suit; it's too obvious a competitive advantage. Likewise, nothing's stopping toll-access journals from hopping on the bandwagon—adapting, in Scholarly Kitchen's parlance—save perhaps the fear that the numbers would be ugly by comparison, which for some journals wouldn't surprise me at all." - Daniel Mietchen