Hello Dr. Nafeesa,

Thank you for posting your questions.

While I don’t have prior experience in the field of rehabilitation sciences, I‘ll attempt to answer your questions in light of a generalized field - not specific to rehabilitation.

1. How to choose a journal?

Choosing a journal depends on multiple factors. The most important of those is the relevance of your research to the journal’s aims and scopes. Through your past experiences in reading the literature related to rehabilitative science, and through a simple literature search in the gap you’re trying to fill, you can choose a list of potentially relevant journals. Once you settle down on that, you can launch each of their websites and read the “Aims/Scopes” sections to understand whether the research you’ve conducted aligns with the journal’s policies.

Next, you may decide to read the journal “guidelines” to understand which articles types they accept.

A further step would be to check the most recently published articles in the journal. This will also help you decide on the relevance of your research to the journal.

One last tip is to check whether your institution offers article processing charge (APC) waivers for certain journals. If you‘re not willing to bear the burden of paying charges for your publication, these journals with APC waivers shall be your target.

2. Open Access vs Subscription journals?

Generally, most journals operate in one of three ways:

1. Fully open-access. This means that all accepted journal articles are free to read without payment. However, open access journals require that the submitters (journal authors) pay the journal for publication. Alternatively, if your institution offers the option of APC waivers, you can publish in a fully open-access journal without paying yourself.

2. Hybrid journals. These journals allow you to publish your article (upon acceptance) in one of two formats - either open access (with you paying the APCs) or subscription-based (with only those subscribed to the journal being able to view the article and without you paying.

3. Subscription-based. Those journals only offer those subscribed to the journal to view its published articles. Authors who publish here don’t need to pay any APCs.

In summary, open access journals offer greater visibility (and therefore a greater chance to have your findings cited), but require author to pay APCs. Conversely, subscription-based journals offer lower visibility, but you are not asked to pay any APCs.

3. Do preprints hold a significant value?

Well, preprints are unpublished research articles which might be under review or submitted to the journal. Preprints may allow you to get citations as they are available on servers such as MedRvix, but preprinted articles are usually not peer-reviewed. Therefore, clinicians cannot use them to change their practice.

I hope these answer your questions. I wish you a wonderful day!