The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) has signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). 

The Declaration was framed at the December 2012 meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology. It calls on the world scientific community to stop using journal-based metrics, particularly journal impact factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, or in the assessment of individual scientists' contributions.The Declaration also emphasises that such metrics should not be the basis for hiring, promotion, or funding decisions (Cagan, 2013).

As a scientific union, the IUCr wishes to promote best practice in the assessment of scientific research by institutions, funding bodies and other organisations. Basing evaluation on metrics such as the impact factor can be detrimental to innovation as they can e.g. drive researchers to work in fields that are highly populated and where the large number of researchers make citation of one's work more likely (Alberts, 2013).

More recent publications show that concern over the inappropriate use of journal impact factors continues to grow (Casadevall et al., 2016; Callaway, 2016), and also provide new proposals for greater transparency from publishers (Larivière et al., 2016). The policy of IUCr Journals is to present impact factors within the context of a broader range of journal-based metrics such as 5-year impact factors, Eigenfactors, publication times etc. (see, for example, http://journals.iucr.org/a/services/about.html) and also provide article-level metrics (see http://journals.iucr.org/services/article_download_statistics.html). We also publish journal citation distributions for each of our journals. The IUCr emphasizes that even these extended metrics are measures of journals performance and must not be used for an individual scientist's performance for recruitment, promotion, or funding decisions.

Alberts, B. (2013).  Science, 340, 787.

Cagan, R. (2013). Dis. Models Mech. 6, 869–870. 

Callaway, E. (2016). Nature, 535, 201–211.

Casadevall, A., Bertuzzi, S., Buchmeier, M. J., Davis, R. J., Drake, H., Fang, F. C., Gilbert, J., Goldman, B. M., Imperiale, M. J., Matsumura, P., McAdam, A. J., Pasetti, M. F., Sandri-Goldin, R. M., Silhavy, T., Rice, L., Young, J. H. & Shenk, T. (2016). Microbiol. Mol. Biol. Rev. 80, i–ii.

Larivière, V., Kiermer, V., MacCallum, C. J., McNutt, M., Patterson, M., Pulverer, B., Swaminathan, S., Taylor, S. & Curry, S. (2016). bioRxiv,  http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/062109.