Dear Stefania,

that’s a good question.

For an academic, I think to publish in a good journal must be the big aim and the visibility is assured by the international reach of the journal, where or if it is indexed, readership, etc.

About the open access publisher, a major debate is ongoing regarding their transparency. So particular attention should be paid to their choice.

Here a very interesting paper about this subject:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1087/20130203/epdf

Dear Stefania,

that’s a good question.

For an academic, I think to publish in a good journal must be the big aim and the visibility is assured by the international reach of the journal, where or if it is indexed, readership, etc.

About the open access publisher, a major debate is ongoing regarding their transparency. So particular attention should be paid to their choice.

Here a very interesting paper about this subject:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1087/20130203/epdf

Hi. I think the open access option is more suitable for the research funded by a specific institution. I did not try the option, but maybe the peer-review process for open access options is shorter or somewhat easier. Although, open access articles can be more visible, I prefer the traditional process vs open access.

thank you all for your kind answers.

I actually also prefer the traditional way for submission, but sometimes performing reviews I feel  that journals are less restrictive in accepting papers if open access, not to mention the speed of the process....

Dear all,

the difference is not between traditional process and open access, but rather the overall quality of the journals and their policy for acceptance of submitted papers.

I give an example of my direct experience. I have been for several years an Associate Editor for an Elsevier Journal. At a certain time the overall quality of the published papers was poor and the IF of the journal was low. Within the Editorial Board members, we established to increase the quality of the published papers and acceptance fell from 85% to 20%, consequently the IF  increased 3 times. The aim was therefore achieved by making a hard selection on the papers submitted for the publication.

Dear Dr.Stefania Squadrone,

I think there are many ways to share research but sharing through open access will save you time.

I think big NO !!!, an open access publication is a simple financial technique for gaining money, so we have to participate in many trusted academic sites for sharing our published papers to get more visibility and consequently get more citations.

Here below a list of some trusted and reputable academic websites:

www.scholar.google.com/citations

www.researchgate.net

www.orcid.org

www.academia.edu

www.linkedin.com

www.mendeley.com

www.altmetric.com

And many other sites.

Regards, Emad

Dear Stefania,

Some new open access journals are also classified as predatory journals. To publish in a good journal must be the first aim. The visibility is usually good in well known international journals, because of indexing etc. For some studies it may be wise to pay a fee to get open access in an highly ranked journal.

Regards,

Jan Aa

dear all

thank you again for sharing your opinion.

stefania

The website "Think. Check. Submit.?" provides an easy-to-use checklist that researchers can refer to when they are investigating whether a journal can be trusted. http://thinkchecksubmit.org

I wrote an article on predatory journals and predatory conferences and would be glad to send it to anyone that has an interest in this subject. All the comments are in line with my opinion, however, the problem is much more serious in that these predatory publications have introduced thousands of papers into the public domain that are increasingly getting cited in other papers. Regards, Alex

Dear,

Some researchers find it roughly not easy to use the traditional way, so they simply go to the open access. I personally prefer the first, but pratically they find themselfves obliged to go through the second for many reasons, amongst the poor facilities in laboratories, the poor english, the short procedure of rewiewing the paper, the deadline given by the fundings, the need to get a degree, the need to boost the CV, the stress of looking for a job, the availability of open access journals....

📷 Hi Stefania Squadron

The difference between traditional process and open access is that in traditional process reader should pay for reading the article and in open access author should pay for publishing the article . Apart from that traditional process consuming lot of time to publish the paper but in open access you can publish your article within as short period.

It is your choice to select the appropriate journal for your publication.

Because of open access you are able to read the huge amount of publications. If open access is not there is substantial reduction available publications

NIH to researchers: Don’t publish in bad journals, please

"The U.S. National Institutes of Health has noticed something: More of the research it’s funding is ending up in questionable journals. Recently, the agency issued a statement highlighting some qualities of these journals -- aggressively soliciting submissions, failing to provide clear information about pricing -- and urging researchers to avoid them."

retractionwatch.com/2017/12/01/nih-researchers-dont-publish-bad-journals-please

Hi Stefania.

Your query cuts both ways really. Yes. On one hand, the open access model means well for academic publishing. A robust albeit brief peer review means academic publishing is no longer a preserve of the big 7 publishers. Further, there's no bigger turnoff to a reader than when asked to pay to access an article. This is the very essence of the traditional/ closed access model.Also, the readership and visibility of open access is far much greater than that of the traditional process. Open access really does well in getting information out there.

No. On the flip side, it might appear easier to publish in some open access journals but this comes at a price. As financial gain is the main motive of these journals, they couldn't care less about standing and/or repute. More often than not such journals only have google scholar as an abstracting and indexing source. Thus, the visibility of articles published in such journals is low in stark contrast to articles with multiple abstracting and indexing sources.

This is an interesting question but I am not sure how strong a dichotomy it actually represents, as many journals (including many of those published by Elsevier and Springer) can, for a fee, publish your article open access even without being open access as a whole; of course, one must check separately whether this could be done for any specific journal one is interested in.

Moreover, many journals also allow the authors to post a preprint or postprint or author-prepared version of the paper version of their article on their personal web site or at a repository like arXiv.org but again one should check each journal specifically for that (and for the exact definition of what does this particular journal mean by a preprint or postprint or author-prepared version of the paper ). This is commonly known as self-archiving or green open access. Of course, this probably would NOT suffice if one is officially required to publish open access by, say, the university or the grant agency .

Also, many Springer journals allows sharing their articles via ReadCube so that they can be read by anyone (but cannot be downloaded if one has no valid subscription) who has a sufficiently modern browser to handle enhanced PDF; for example the published version of my recent article Integrable (3+1)-dimensional systems with rational Lax pairs can be read in this way here: http://rdcu.be/Dkwh .

This can be a reasonable substitute for open access (of course, if one is NOT officially required to publish open access by, say, the university or the grant agency), and again one should check this for each journal separately whether this feature is available for it; see also https://www.springernature.com/gp/researchers/sharedit for details.

Open access makes easy to publicize your research work and people can download your paper your paper free of cost.

Generally article published in the open access journal have high citation as they are easily available

I think the open access option is more suitable for the research

In conclusion, I may say that the advantage of open access are the easy and cost-free scientific dissemination, the main drawback is that the cost falls intererely on the authors of the manuscript. As a reviewer , I still have a perception that articles in open access are more easily accepted than those not in open acces but with equal scientific quality. Thank you for all your kind answers.

Stefania

Identifying Predatory or Pseudo-Journals

This document from the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) aims to provide guidance to help editors, researchers, funders, academic institutions and other stakeholders distinguish predatory journals from legitimate journals. http://www.wame.org/identifying-predatory-or-pseudo-journals.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that science has become a business. Money attracts money. If you are quite glorious in publications, you will get awarded grants, you will be chosen in well-paid positions, invited by "prestigious journals", you gain more from the glory of the publications; If you win more money, you can afford to pay for even greater visibility, as in open access. "Scientific production" and its quantification is, in my opinion, a business concept to which almost everyone slips. In addition, making scientific glory from the work of others is a highly appreciated "style" of science. Two issues are raised here: (1) editorial policy to get "top" journal and (2) author "policy" (or strategy) to get glory. The glory of branded, aggressively promoted "top" journals does not exclusively rely on the highest quality articles only. I am sure you have already asked yourself, at least once, why a trivial article got published in a top journal.... Secondly, take for example, the "review" style (critical, tutorial, or any other kind). A review in which you write what others have done, ask for permission to use two or three eye-catching figures made by others, will get citations almost automatically in any introductory sentence of the forthcoming articles from that field. Almost each field or subfield is leaded by a journal devoted to reviews only.There is no "high quality journal"; there are "brands" or "luxury" journals .. There is "high quality article". And high quality, accurate and honest articles are sometimes available in "small", not "significant", "modest" journals. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Thank you for your opinion. I absolutely agree with Simona and still think that a quality paper does not need a fee to be published. If it possible, money should be used to pay scholarship for younger researchers ....but this is only my opinion.kind regards, Stefania

Oh, yes, my dear fellows, you are so right! Talking from your own experience! Totally agree!

I think it depends much on the quality of the article and the quality of the journal. Basically it is nice to get an article published in a good journal free of charge, on the other hand (just as an example) - I will start publishing my own open access journal on plasma physics (www.jtsp.eu) in July this year and I have to take some fee to cover the spell checking, formatting, and my general working time, etc.

But at least for me it is also important that everyone can read scientific articles since the work behind them is mostly paid by the public in the form of research grants, etc... Hence, I believe open access is a good way to bring your research to more people, especially researchers from countries with less access to recent literature and I think that should also be an aim of a good scientist - to promote science - and not only getting your papers in the highest impact factor journals (which is nice, of course) without paying anything.

I think it depends upon the quality of the article and the quality of the journal.

'Homo ornat locum, non locus hominem'. (The place doesn't honor the man, but the man the place). The same I would say about papers and journals. IMHO: it does more matter what is written, rather then where it is published. I agree with @Simona Cinta Pinzaru