The goal for academic research is add some contributions to the knowledge. Journals with good IF means that researches in this journal have been cited by many researchers (the researches are widely visible). Most universities and research centers offer subscriptions for their researchers to access elite journals. Since journals with good IF allow only quality researches to pass through. I will go for good IF journal if I have a research that is really qualified to appear in that journal.

Another point to mention is that good researches will force researches to cite it regardless of where it is appeared. 

Dear Irfan,

I' like to thank you for your profound question, first of all. Classical requirement from research funds to contemporary researcher is to publish the article with research results in journals with high impact factor (IF) or indexed in mentioned database. It is like dictate but researcher  agreed with it when he was struggling for contract. And I think he  have to to comply with this condition. Some times author can found open access journal (OSJ) with a suitable profile and IF. Only then it is possible to publish in such OAJ, I think. 

Kind regards,

Valery

Dear Safwan,

Thank you for the info which I believe it is from your vast publications in such prestigious journals.  I wish to be one of those good tesearchers one day.

There are a different point of view for PhD students. For us (in my case) is neccesary to have a paper in a journal in JCR before I can read my thesis. This is needed to check that my thesis is significant for the science community.

I think that we can publish our work in open access journals and get experience or publish small papers that never will be accepted in indexed journals. Also, the economic situation reduces our opportunities to assist to international congresses and extend our papers in a journal so is an added problem.

Yes Dr Valery that's the best, open access with IF but as you precisely mentioned, the number of them is not much. For beginners like me maybe open access is the path to learn on how to publish, small work but later on, as what Dr Jose Manuel mentioned.

Really, publication policy is much depending from author scientific position. For PhD students and postdoc fellows indexed journals are hard accessible. But not every OAJ can solve problem and author has to know the list of OAJ's he can use, I think. Young scientists must to know about predatory open access publishing (see e,g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open_access_publishing) and avoid to publish their papers in OAJ from Jeffrey Beall's List: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Beall

http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/