Your question cannot be answered in a good way until you define your target audience. What do you really mean "needs to be viewed by many"? Do you want to reach politicians and policy makers, industrial entrepreneurs or the scientific community? Is it more important to reach a local audience or an international audience? Only when you've defined this, you can go ahead an choose an appropriate forum for publishing your data.

In this context, you also need to understand how your intended audience searchers for and obtains information. Is it e.g. through subscription to certain journals or through web-based searches?

People tend to think the publishing in OA journals is some kind of magic solution to reach a wide audience, but I think this is a great oversimplification and in some cases, simply incorrect.

Dear Najim,

I think several factors can determine in which journal someone publish his work. If someone prefers his work to be seen by a larger group of researchers open access journals are better. But in many cases these journals want publication fee and due to this amount of money, no manuscript is rejected. Therefore you can find a lot of week studies in these types of journals.

Some researchers prefer to publish their high quality work in those journals which usually are not open access and they are free of charge. The main problem about these journals is that more time is needed the review process to be finished.

Regards

Hi Benyamin

Thanks for your response. The main problem with the high quality journals are that the papers are not accessible by all ( wither the paper has to purchased or you should have subscribed to the database which allows downloading the paper),

I will like to add a few things more after what Benyamin has said.

The important thing to a researcher is that his/her research work should be published in atleast a peer reviewed journal with fee (if your institution/project is paying) or better if there is no fee charged. Then you can share your work with other researchers like here or other sites. Definitely interested researchers will notice your work.

Nature

On TV.

Though I NEVER look at TV.

So I will miss your message.

The rest of humanity won't.

Cheers,

Frank

SP.: I don't even read Science or Nature. But sometimes I download interesting articles ;-)

I think researchers should make efforts to publish their research outcomes in high impact jouirnals. The open access journals are more often than not have low scientific quality and quite frequently some doubious litrature is added this way.

Dear Saif,

I think all agree with you but the problem discussed here is other thing. Of course high impact journals are better but it is not possible a wider group of researchers to access to these types of articles. It is interesting for me to know how this problem can be solved.

Benyamin but this is not a solution to create a doubious parallel litrature for sake of accessibility. See how reseach gate is working if you see the article and author can be contacted. There are facilities like sciencedirect, web of science, scopus, etc. Also regarding the research done in europe atleast in UK the government sponsored research is available on net so it the EU sponsored research, they are making it mandatory to have open access.

To re-phrase my previous comment, i make the point more clear now. In order to make your research output more visible (if this is what you are really after), then you better off finding a peer-reviewed journal indexed in Web of Knowledge or Scopus databases. The later is the largest database of research articles (They claim), so. your work is visible to millions of researchers all over the world..

precisely this is the point I was trying to make, so we are on teh same page.

If you want your research to visible to the public, aim for an open-access journal. If you want your work to be visible by your scientific community, you can find out which journals are the most notorious in your field. This website gives you the top of the top in each field:

http://www.sciencegateway.org/rank/index.html

Publish where the relevant discussion is occurring. Sure, open access is good, but if it is an open access journal in the wrong field, it won't help.

I've done an empirical analysis that supports this, here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2012.11.009 or http://epubs.scu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2465&context=esm_pubs

Depends on your target audience. Who do you want to influence with your research? It makes a big difference if you target fellow scientists, grant organizations, policy makers, the global public, or a particular local public (for example Australian farmers or national park authorities in Sumatra). Open access is useful, but it is easy to become buried among the many thousands of papers published at the same time as yours. A good media release helps to draw attention to your paper. And automatically, newspapers and other media would be more interested if the science came from a high impact journal. But then again, a farmers' website like www.farmonline.com.au/‎ might be more useful if Australian farmers need to know about the science outcome, or an article in a major Indonesian newspaper, if national park managers are targeted.

Erik I guess media publication is surely required for populrizatiuon of research and often will need little modifications to omit those scientific and technical detailings that goes in a research paper. But both of these have their own target. A scientific research should be published in the high impact journals in relevent field of research and media reports should be prepared based on these key findings. I guess a good idea will be to suggest the numerous television channels to take up this responsibility and bringing hardcore research in a news form or documentary to public for awareness.

Dear All,

Thank you very much for all your comments and inputs. I hope this discussion will continue further and through which many researchers could be benefited.

Thanks again.

Najim it is important issue but unfortunately most third world researchers are not taking a serious note on how to improve their international exposure without compromising on quality.

I am afraid to tell you all that papers published in open sites, such as Research Gate, Academia, Scribd, and others, usually get more hits than papers published in academic journals. Free knowledge, available to all, may have a great impact, not only specialized articles that appear in journals that are read by a few people who work in a very particular field. It is OK to be a part of a scientific community, but I also think that we should look to other venues for publishing, intended to a wider audience. Best regards.

Publications in journals that are recognised by Scopus might assist... in addition to what was mentioned earlier.

Reputable general Open Acces journals. PLoS One and the like, Keep an eye on OA projects of big international publishers (Sage Open, Springer Open, Palgrave Open etc.) i think that they will soon surpass the critical level. Build some initial altmetrics impact to your already publisehed papers, with the use of article level marketing and the social web. In the case of papers where you have signed over the ownership of your copyright to the publisher, you can stlll build external weblinks to the published material.

Peer J is a reputable Scientific Open Access Publisher. They have an offer on to celebrate 10 years of the Berlin Declaration. It might be of interest to colleagues on this list. See here [ http://blog.peerj.com/post/67476390580/free-publications-in-peerj?utm_source=summary_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=connection ].

Your question cannot be answered in a good way until you define your target audience. What do you really mean "needs to be viewed by many"? Do you want to reach politicians and policy makers, industrial entrepreneurs or the scientific community? Is it more important to reach a local audience or an international audience? Only when you've defined this, you can go ahead an choose an appropriate forum for publishing your data.

In this context, you also need to understand how your intended audience searchers for and obtains information. Is it e.g. through subscription to certain journals or through web-based searches?

People tend to think the publishing in OA journals is some kind of magic solution to reach a wide audience, but I think this is a great oversimplification and in some cases, simply incorrect.

I would encourage you to reflect on how you usually find papers that are of interest to you? Whether you end up publishing in traditional or open access journals, definitely make sure any journal you publish in is indexed (e.g. in PubMed) so people can find it with keywords and authors. I would also have to say that most views of my recent papers are through sites like ResearchGate. . . !

Dear Rachel, Good points. You can also see them in Google Scholar, etc.

See also my recent Q&A on Search Engines:

Which 'Search Engine' you recommend for students?

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Which_Search_Engine_you_recommend_for_students