Perhaps you want to check "eLife" (http://elife.elifesciences.org/). As this year Noble Prize winner Randy Schekman declares boycott of top science journals "as they distort scientific process" (see, e.g., http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/09/nobel-winner-boycott-science-journals), this new open-access project - with Randy Schekman as editor-in chief - aims at publishing outstanding research across life science and biomedicine. No IF (yet), but I would dare to predict growing impact in near future...
I think so. One problem is that no all journals are written in English. For example in my country, Spain, the journal "Revista Española de Patología" posses High scientfic level.
The answer is yes of course, but the problem is quite complex. First of all e.g in taxonomy most of the journals have no impact factor because they publish only one issue/year. The other problem is the language ban. Many journals (good or poor quality) publish in other language than English, the cannot have an IP either. And of course the IP selection is highly biased for the "western" journals, it is quite difficult to get IP for a journal published e.g in Easter Europe or a 3th world country.
There are many application specific journals that publish great and highly relevant science but which is only relevant to a select readership and hence do not generate high impact factors. A example would be the Journal of Lymphodaema which has a great reputation but a very narrow readership.
There are many examples. Some of them do not have IF as they are relatively new though published by a highly reputed publishers (PeerJ, Frontiers series, F1000 research for example). Many other journals which are published by an educational institute or for a society often don't have an IF as they don't bother IF. At the end of the day IF is nothing but a business product which Thomson Router is selling to the publishers as the end customers (authors, their institutions and their peers) purchase the concept. But it is not an absolute parameter for scientific excellence or quality of a journal.
Yes, there are many good journals with no IF. Some of the problem is the country of publication and the international patronage of the journal. Often time, researchers from the west hardly publish in the journals from other parts of the world. The IF is a rating for mostly journals published in English language. Another problem is the issue of pubmed index. This is a problem with most journals from the east as they have no index and so have no IF but they are good journals
Well let me give you a specific example. Please have a look at this journal which publishes original research and other type of articles in the field of, mainly, traditional medicine: http://www.springer.com/biomed/journal/13596. To my opinion it is a good, in fact very good journal in its area, the publisher is highly renowned, though the editorial board is not kind of global, but good enough I think. Still this journal has no IF, perhaps they don't bother to have any!
Posessing IF and its value depends on number of citations. Thus:
- journals publishing reviews may have IF higher than journals publishing narrow research papers,
- popular discipline or topic may increase IF more then rare topic or narrow discipline,
- number of active writing scientific readers may be critical, thus dissemination is important (open access vs. pay 60 Euros per article),
- indexation in popular data base (e.g. PubMed in medicine and health sciences) may be important.
Language other than English may significantly influence lower IF or lack of IF, but I can imagine similar future situation with Chinese, where is more and more scientific journals.
Another one I forgot to mention earlier which I was tracking for longtime. I found their publications very interesting, of good quality and intellectually up-to-date. You may have a look and read some of their articles: http://functionalfoodscenter.net/the-journal-of-ffhd.html
If you are not interesting to publish with impact factor, i suggest to you to publish with SCOPUS index journals,
It's a debatable question. Universities or research institutions usually prefer journals with impact factor. Journals with ISI impact factors are considered high quality journals. So preferable to go for those journals. However, you can't publish in ISI indexed journals; at least better to target SCOPUS indexed or PubMed indexed journals.
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