Saleh,

as hard as it may seems, good journals have extremely high costs for low income countries, and often also for practitioners, this latter case in case their firms do not have corporate accesses.

As a result, pricing barriers limit diffusion, which in turns limits opportunities for economies of scale.

Although it all seems a black or white question, yours suggest to look into the gey part of it, something like: how could good knowledge be spread to potential new markets?

Some degree of price/offer mix may open the door to fill the gap between commercial publications (i.e.: HBR) and purely academic ones, seeding in this way knwoledge where so far it was unattainable.

Even the highest quality journal operates as a business. Businesses need income to remain in business. We cannot expect a quality journal to have no income at all.

Thank you very much Md Saleh Uddin for your assertion that high impact journals are doing business instead of spreading knowledge by keeping no access for the article unless payments are made or ensured.

It is possible that there is a lot incentives for those journals which make general access to them quite restricted to direct payments or commercial transactions. This is the opposite of open access journals or journals which publish articles without charging production fee for them.

Let me begin by stating that publishing industry is a good business and this applies to what you have just raised in this question. These could be accessible to companies, institutions, organizations, groups, or individuals who are willing and able to pay for their subscription fees. This means low income earners cannot afford to pay for their services except through special third-party arrangements, in some cases. You, itt can be asserted they are irrelevant or out of touch with poor countries.

This means, in my opinion that, their circulations are obviously limited to the usual suspects or readers from individuals, organizations, or institutions that can afford to pay for their services or products. What is considered is to do with the rates of citations. There is some elements of inbreeding in this case because the same people who read them and cite them are the very ones who will later on buy them and cite again. So, there is also some aspects of self deception involved in it.

In this case, annd given that the so called high impact is the preserve of a small club or a limited or a very tiny audience, it can be claimed that the said high impact is not necessarily universal but a high impact among the privileged few.The attributes of the high impact need to be geographically representative for the claim of high impact to make sense for social, economic, environment, legal, and political development.

The idea of high impact should now face a real paradigm shift to focus on community media such as community radio or TV, citizen science, community science, or community engaged scholarship research perspectives. These approaches and some similar others put the people or the local communities at the centre of development activities for sustainable development.

I think we should flee from intellectual dishonesty or deception in favour research ethics. For example, many researchers who publish their articles in the so-called high impact journals, begin by collecting their data from the local communities from the general public or the citizens as their respondents, subjects, or participants.

This means that, the communities are the true owners of the data or information which they publish without validating them with the communities or without giving them access through public media or mass media, which is the most important source of public information. These are the true high impact journals as they offer unfettered access to information by the general public, citizens, or communities.

Those who conduct research or projects in communities need to have the minimum research ethics to freely share information with all the stakeholders in community or national development process. They need to borrow from the concept of research ethics which is akin to the social corporate responsibility (SCR) by organizations I think this was quite a very interesting observation. I wish to rest my case here.

Best regards

Wilson

I believe its undercovered business with name of goodness. Cost and control of what to publish, how and when are all affecting researchers and the spread of knowledge especially those in lower income countries whom their research conditions are very different from the ideal part of the world.

Here in the United States, high cost journals are often given more reverence by academic instutions so that faculty are pressured to submit to journals with expensive subscription fees. While open access journals may not always be considered equal in terms of lineage and prestige, many are very high quality. Further, because of their wideaoread dissemenation and acceasibility they offer authors the widest possible reach. I personally vastly prefer open access journals.

Another model that has not been mentioned is the hybrid open access journal model. Hybrid open access is a publishing model in which subscription-based journals allow authors to make their individual articles open access based on payment of an article publication charge. This certainly increases access to articles but the downside is that it is prohibitive to many authors who do not have institutional or grant support for their papers.

Journals need to be in business and this involve costs and profit but payments could be made in accordance to the payment capacity of the authors...and parameters could be designed to assess this