Due to the fact that many profit oriented companies are not ready to pay the costs of publication download for their co-workers and (sadly) many governements just want good results form the researchers in their country without providing support for their universities and academic research institutions (and not only in poor countries) to have free access to major scientific databases, several scientits either use sci-hub or just cite papers that are freely available on the internet (legally or illegally). I am fully aware of the costs of high quality publishing (being a co-worker of an online journal) and of the fact that someone has to pay the costs: either the readers or the authors. (It is another question that scientific publication, as well as conference organization gradually became a dirty money collecting business). Nevertheless, my impression is that open access publications (I mean really peer reviewed, high quality open access journal, not the predatory ones) have some advantage, insofar as they are available for "poor" researcher, therefore sometimes are better cited. I have so statistics to support this opinion, it is just a feeling.
Hi Gyorgy - if you are 'in the business', shouldn't it be more than a feeeling? Us academics are looking for guidance.
To me, every research paper/material must be open/accessible to every non commercial researcher so that it could further flourish and extend via junior researchers. This commercialism obviously creates a big hurdle in understanding importance of high and low quality research.
@Dean The journal I work for as an excutive editor Express Polymer Letters has failrly high impact factor among polymer relted journals (2.875) but I have no broad comparison. The impact factor itself qualifies both the paper selection (our reject rate is above 80%, so we retain the good papers). My (theoretical) question would be on papers of similar quality appearing in open access and non-open access journals. I am also interested in the citation practice of active publishing scientist. As for me, if I am looking for a technical datum to be cited and if an article s not downloadable, but another one is open access I will cite the second one without hesitation.
Thank you for your question. You are raising important points. Based on current studies, also I enclose a review of the matter by Elsevier publisher for its open access journals, there are no definite advantages of citations of articles published by open-access journals. These findings contradict early reported findings or hypotheses made about open-access journals.
Read the report: https://www.elsevier.com/connect/citation-metrics-and-open-access-what-do-we-know
Another question is why this journals that demand processing charges/ publication charges take so long in time evaluation to obtain impact factor and why impact factor affects the importance or acceptance from scientific community. Since impact factor is of great importance why all this open access journals are allowed to exist? Is there a condition related to recognition of published research that is related to the impact factor?
Dear Dr Bogiatzdis, I believe that the reason is that there are so many students all over the world who MUST publih or perish. The lower level journals make business out of it and out of the pride of several scientists who are ready to pay to see their names in these journals even if almost noone reads the papers. But, on the contrary I did sometimes find excellent and inetersting papers in opean access journals - even in journals without impact factor.
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