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I have read many questions on this site that relate to Journal impact factors, for example, in relation to how that may affect where to publish etc.

I am wondering is there an independent oversight body that regulates the area of impact factors?

I was thinking along the lines of something like the International Organization for Standardization that regulates the ISO standards across the world.

Specifically is there an independent body (either commercial or not for profit) that sets the standards for impact factors and audits them so as that one impact factor can be compared with another with the knowledge that they are calculated in the same way?

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No.

Academic publishing is not regulated by any oversight body. There is not even a universal standard for what constitutes a publication.

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    ...or a universal standard for how to calculate an impact factor.
    – vadim123
    May 2, 2014 at 13:50
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    Such metrics are not unlike rating agencies for economy, aren't they?
    – Raphael
    May 3, 2014 at 9:25
  • @JeffE While you're answer raised a valid point about what is a publication in my question I was interested in the independence/standardisation and the ability to audit of Impact factors rather than oversight of all Academic publishing. I've tried to edit my question to better clarify this.
    – gman
    May 6, 2014 at 11:31
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    Sure, but the definition of impact factor relies in turn on the definition of "publication", since only "publications" can include citations that actually count.
    – JeffE
    May 7, 2014 at 2:47
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    @Raphael I would say that you are quite right. It's basically private companies (Thomson Reuters, Elsevier, ...) and "semi-public bodies" (e.g. American Mathematical Society) that compute citations and related bibliometrics. How comes that the publicly owned scientific foundations (such as NSF or the Czech GAČR) base their decisions on bibliometrical data by private (and easily corrupted) organizations, who knows.
    – yo'
    Apr 13, 2016 at 14:20
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There's multiple questions contained within your question that have different answers.

Is there independent oversight of Journal Impact Factors? ... Now I am wondering is there a oversight body that regulates the area?

This depends on what you mean by "independent". If you mean an official unbiased centralised not-for-profit professional organisation, then the best answer is probably no.

But ...

Specifically is there a body that sets the standards for impact factors and audits them so as that one impact factor can be compared with another with the knowledge that they are calculated in the same way?

The answer to this part is definitively yes. The notion of an impact factor (<- a recognised term of art) was invented by the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), Eugene Garfield. The impact factor of journals has been computed by ISI since 1975 using a prescribed methodology.

In terms of comparability, the impact factor is specifically the average number of citations per publication in the journal, over a fixed time span (the two years previous, or five years for 5 year impact). Citations are collected from the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) index.

And so if you are a journal editor and you wish to have an impact factor, you need to apply to ISI (now owned by Thompson Reuters). They oversee the computation of the official Impact Factor metrics in common use today, as publicised on various journal websites.

In fact, Thompson Reuters (through ISI) own the concept of Impact Factor for journals and copyright said metrics.

So for sure there is a body "that sets the standards for impact factors and audits them so as that one impact factor can be compared with another with the knowledge that they are calculated in the same way". But I would hesitate to call Thompson ISI an independent body.

This answer is not intended to promote the idea of an Impact Factor, but merely to indicate its oversight, regulation and history as per the question.

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    To the downvoter: how can I improve my answer?
    – badroit
    May 3, 2014 at 1:38
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    ISI/Thompson Reuters is NOT independent. They get regularly slammed for playing with what they consider an "article" ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1475651 and I think there are issues of reproducibility.
    – StrongBad
    May 3, 2014 at 8:02
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    There is not a body that audits impact factor calculations. You claim there is but give no citation. Obviously, Thompson cannot be said to audit itself.
    – David Ketcheson
    May 3, 2014 at 12:06
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    I state in my answer: "This depends on what you mean by "independent". If you mean an official unbiased centralised not-for-profit professional organisation, then the best answer is probably no." But there very clearly is a body "that sets the standards for impact factors and audits them so as that one impact factor can be compared with another with the knowledge that they are calculated in the same way" ... that body is the ISI. I don't understand the downvotes in that I still feel I answered the question as given.
    – badroit
    May 3, 2014 at 18:15
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    @badroit: your answer seems to imply that the computation of impact factors is purely algorithmic and reproducible. Several know cases of journals bargaining their denominators (which "articles" are really counted, does it include editorials, letters, etc.) and a general opacity for which citations are taken into account in the numerator make IF in fact far from transparent and reproducible.
    – Benoît Kloeckner
    May 9, 2015 at 20:05

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