You're all missing the point. Big publishing houses, such as Elsevier, Springer, etc have the networks to provide the exposure needed world-wide. They PAY Google et al. to be most visible.

I am the Editor-in-Chief of WETLANDS, now published by Springer. Since joining Springer, our journal has sky-rocketed in terms of submissions and readership. As a result, the Society of Wetland Scientists, the owner of the journal, now has significant earnings from the journal. When they published it themselves, only a few years ago, the Society had to supplement the publication with $50K each year!

Publishing costs money, and either the authors pay (Open Access) or the readers pay (as for any other product). And you pay for what you get. What you get from publishing with established journals and publishers is the exposure your work deserves. If you feel you can do without that, and without proper systems for quality assurance, as well as a guarantee that your work will remain available online for a very long time, then by all means be my guest.

Marinus Otte

Editor-in-Chief, WETLANDS

That is definitely an interesting question, which needs to be addressed. It was during my research extremely frustrating that some of the journals expected me to pay for the opportunity to read an article I needed for my research. So - I thought that I will be paid when I submit an article to one of these credited journals. And I got the shock of my life. Since I am a private person, I have to pay a fortune for:

a) the proofreading of the article (up to R30 per 100 words) and

b) the publishing (R100 per page). That means that I have to pay more than R5000 to get a 15 pages paper published after my research have been sponsored by myself.

I would agree that we have nothing to loose since I also prefer to read digital papers as well. Since we have to pay a fortune for the publishing of our work, we can choose where we want it to be published and seen.

Would people stil know where to find your work? Would it have less of a readership with other channels? People know these journals and know what type of information to find in them.

People don't "go" anywhere to find your work. They type search terms into a browser window and Google shows them what's available. If your work is hosted in an open access repository, or even on your own blog, Google will find it. If your work is popular, it will rise in the ranking. I agree that there would be challenges involved but I think that with the availability of free, open source software solutions, it might be possible to create new, credible and reliable channels for finding and disseminating research output.

You're all missing the point. Big publishing houses, such as Elsevier, Springer, etc have the networks to provide the exposure needed world-wide. They PAY Google et al. to be most visible.

I am the Editor-in-Chief of WETLANDS, now published by Springer. Since joining Springer, our journal has sky-rocketed in terms of submissions and readership. As a result, the Society of Wetland Scientists, the owner of the journal, now has significant earnings from the journal. When they published it themselves, only a few years ago, the Society had to supplement the publication with $50K each year!

Publishing costs money, and either the authors pay (Open Access) or the readers pay (as for any other product). And you pay for what you get. What you get from publishing with established journals and publishers is the exposure your work deserves. If you feel you can do without that, and without proper systems for quality assurance, as well as a guarantee that your work will remain available online for a very long time, then by all means be my guest.

Marinus Otte

Editor-in-Chief, WETLANDS

Marinus, I wonder if you could clarify your point about paying Google. Anyone can pay for an ad on Google, and I thought these were clearly flagged at the top or side. But are you saying that the Google algorithm can be subverted, that by paying (bribing) Google your website can falsely appear on page 1 of Google?

The highest impact journals, the traditional longstanding academic journals, do not charge authors. The new Open Access journals charge authors, but not readers. Most have not been around long enough to have established impact factors. Some start off free or with low processing charges to attract authors. What is the evidence that journals with high IFs charge more?

Dear Anthony,

I don’t know about internet referencing of journal, but I figure that what Marina says is exact. I know by an informatician friend who launched a society for websites creation that Google charges societies to appear in a good rank when people request peculiar keywords. The price would depend on the area you want to cover (a region, a country or several countries).

As regards the publication of articles, the system is biased, as the highest impact factor journals are the most visible ones through internet, because they belong to powerful publishing groups, as stressed by Marina. Michael’s idea is a good one, but it would take long to change people’s fundamental attitudes and I’m not sure that everyone is prepared for struggling against the overall conception of publishing.

I think that a goal of PLoS publishing group was to counterbalance the weight of journals with high IF belonging notably to Nature publishing group. Yet, authors are charged a lot as you mentioned, Anthony. The growing number of open access journal and the extended alternative choices of offered to authors may have however started to impact high impact factor journals (see http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121107073034.htm). This may goes in your way, Michael.

Regards,

Sébastien

I'm afraid I don't understand this last comment, Sebastien. Impact factors are determined by citations, and I don't see what the internet has to do with this, apart from allowing more efficient searches of the scientific literature.

As for Google ranking charges, I have just checked on the Google site for Search Engine Optimization, which states:

"Advertising with Google won't have any effect on your site's presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results."

It is vital for all my scientific work that I can rely on the objectivity of the entries on page one of a Google search, so I would be very upset if it turned out that ranks can be bought.

It's easy Anthony. When you want to refer to a study for an article, you've got two mainways to identify the food references: Pubmed or Google. With the second option, you've got more chance to find an article from a high impact factor journal, because it's well referenced in internet.

There are tricks though to your internet wabsite appear in page one of google, but it's not within my field of skills. That said ranks can't be bought by authors, but the systme is done in such a way that article in high impact and well referenced journals will be more visible than ones publisehd in good but wilth ower IF.

Sébastien

I have published a lot on Musical Hallucinations, so have looked this topic up on Google Scholar. The articles are ranked roughly by citations, not by journal impact factor. Thus, my second highest hit on GS is to my Medical Hypotheses article, yet I have publications on MHs in 13 other journals with higher IF than Med Hyp does but which appear lower down on GS.