The meaning of ‘impact’: prestige or relevance for developing world research?

This guest post by Eve Gray (a researcher on open access scholarly communications at the Centre for Innovation in Teaching and Learning and the IP Law Unit at the University of Cape Town) on the BioMed Central blog "Open Access in the Developing World" discusses impact (and impact factors), scholarly communication, research prestige and relevance and the inclusion/exclusion of developing world research in established indices.