In the age of the Internet and the movement of open access to scientific knowledge it appears possible to publish articles in any journals, and not only in the elite ones. Such articles will be located using Google Scholar engine, downloaded, if their full text versions are available, and cited if found interesting. So by submitting articles to such journals, scientists will save time on long communications with editors and reviewers of elite journals, while the articles published in low-impact-factor journals will eventually reach the same audience faster and may get the same number of citations. The question of whether or not an article will be cited is becoming increasingly less dependent on the journal in which it is published. In the open access era, articles become available right away, and you do not need to look through volumes and issues of journals as before. Have you experienced any of these trends when you began to publish your articles in open access journals or make you articles from low-impact journals available through the open access facilities? Has anyone tried to trace a connection between the total downloads of articles (for example, on RG) and the number of their citations?
See also Lariviere, V.,Lozano and G.A.,Gingras, A. Are elite journals declining?-2013.-
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1304/1304.6460.pdf
I think that the opposite: the value of publishing in good journals will increase. There is indeed a great number of easily accessible 'grey' scientific literature and a number of articles increases exponentially. Therefore the matter of quality of the published research will become more and more important. If earlier it was difficult to find the article related to your research, now there is too much of such articles. Therefore people need to distinguish valuable articles from the articles they can skip, and they will read articles from the reputable journals in first priority.
In connection with the question I just would like to stress that if one decides to follow the open access route, one should exercise quite a bit of caution while choosing an open access venue for publication. For instance, one can (and perhaps should) check that the journal (or its publisher) to which one intends to submit the paper is not in the Beall's lists of predatory journals (or publishers) at http://scholarlyoa.com . If possible, it is advisable to publish in the journals that charge *neither readers nor the authors* (such journals do exist; this is the so-called diamond open access model as opposed to the golden (i.e., author-pays) open access model) and make preprints and papers available online even before submission (e.g. on http://arxiv.org).
When looking for new work in the field or checking the state of the art thereof, many people in the hard sciences (physics and mathematics) increasingly tend to turn to arXiv.org in addition to (and quite often instead of) the journals, be they elite or not, cf.e.g. the post by the Fields medalist Terry Tao http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/make-your-work-available/.
No! Elite Research journals will not be devalued with the in-coming Open Access era and the low IF journals.
First, with the Internet Age, all researchers have (24H/24 and 7 days/week) the possibilities to make an update about a question. PubMed is very useful with the online abstracts available for all the journals. Furthermore, via Google Scholar and /or RG, or other databases they may have access to the full text, and many institutions have a full text journals package available for all their students, researchers and physicians. They will found many series, but Evidence Based should be used to assess the validity of these publications….
Many Elite Research journals have an online a “coming soon” or “online first” sections, but I agree with the fact that Open Access publications will be more rapidly available on the Net.
The main problems concerning the Open Access journals are not the possibilities to increase their impact factor, according to their number of citations in the last three years, but the QUALITY of the results published in these journals. For instance, remember the Sirénali et al controversy after their publication in Food and Chemical Toxicology….
Indeed, to be published, you have just to pay. Recently, I was very surprised when I discovered that two studies I had reviewed for an OA Editor and considered as “to be rejected” and “need major revisions”, that these two studies had been published without any new submission!
To date, I believe that Open Access journals should not be recommended since abuse is present as found by a Science investigation (4 October 2013): more than an half of 304 open access reviews accepted for publications” faux papers with blatant scientific flaws”.
[See: Who's Afraid of Peer Review? John Bohannon. Science 4 October 2013: 60-65.]
Thus, Elite Research journals will not be devalued with the OA and not Internet era, even if the JAMA Editor informed us recently, after a two months review process, that “Only about half of the approximately 6900 manuscripts submitted to us annually are sent for external review by experts and less than 9% are published in JAMA.”
In the internet age, we will find that most articles are equally visible due to search engines such as Google Scholar. So that these will get more visibility than in the past. However until universities change their tenure and promotion policies where P&T is based on publications in approved journals, we will not see any change in the citations or access of the elite journals.
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