I think the problem is with our evaluation system. We are encouraged to publish in international journals rather than the national journals by our research institutes and universities. Moreover in interviews more weightage is given to international publication. The funding agencies are also attracted to international publications. All these factors force us to publish all or good results and findings in international journals. Findings which are of below average are often send to our national journals. This is the main reason for low impact factor of our journals. The main reason for delay is also the same. If we ourselves don't respect our journals, who else will?

Best Regards,

Naveen

The problem with reach-out is not so great anymore these days. Publications get listed in the Pubmed and can be found via the Internet and also received there as a PDF. This was ways more problematic when your library needed hard-copies of the journal for you to be able to search in.

Impact factor is a matter of citations, the more articles from one journal get cited, the higher the impact factor will get.

I would guess that the Impact Factor and their "late" arrival on the stage are the main causes for that. The tendency that your work as a researcher is rated, at least in part, based on the Impact Factor of the journals you publish in, drives you toward selecting established journals (of which there are already many) with a high Impact Factor to publish your results.

So newcomer journals tend to get only the scraps, resulting in a low Impact Factor and thus starting a "death cycle" for the journal.

The best way to fight this, is to look for other journals in your field.Maybe many high impact papers are not published in these journals.

The time of peer review of some periodicals is a problem. I had an experience of waiting 32 months for an answer.

I think the problem is with our evaluation system. We are encouraged to publish in international journals rather than the national journals by our research institutes and universities. Moreover in interviews more weightage is given to international publication. The funding agencies are also attracted to international publications. All these factors force us to publish all or good results and findings in international journals. Findings which are of below average are often send to our national journals. This is the main reason for low impact factor of our journals. The main reason for delay is also the same. If we ourselves don't respect our journals, who else will?

Best Regards,

Naveen

I feel you pain. This is just a viscious cycle for the process. American or European journals got high IF for thier long history and we all quote their articles. Since they got high IF so it make sense to submit good papers to them. Also, for high IF all the reviewers want to keep their status as reviewers so the editorial board can ask for a rapid response from the reviewers. I have some articles accepted by a domestic journals for more than 16 months and have not been published yet. That is one of the reason why domestic journals are so hard to get a high IF.

i feel that editors of Indian journals are shy of electronic medium, they want every thing in print. Many journals in India have become family journals, where priority is not given to quality of the work but to the people whim they know.

@ Pavithran... I don't think this is a problem with Indian journals alone. Even International journals with high IF behave the same way. They also publish works of people close to them and if you submit a paper on the same topic they would reject it the very next day quoting that "the paper is out of scope of the journal".

I really second Naveen and have personally experienced it several times. They can use all kinds of reason to reject the work.

Dear Jayaraj !!!

Many of the Indian journals publish less quality articles and references used in those articles are also cited from very old books, low quality articles etc. And to insure their quality they spent lots of time for the review processes as well. I have experience of waiting till 1 year to get the first response from the journals as well. Editors and journal reviewer are so lazy since they do not got any rewards for reviewing the articles. But to ensure their prestige they still continue the low quality publications. Many of monthly published journals are now starting bimonthly publications and so on... So Many of the India based journals are low quality to be cited in the articles indicating less or no impact factors as well.

I agree will most of you, history of the European and American journals is one factor, since older journals have high IF due to one reason citations and are more known to us, however, we are more attracted to them. Other factors, they have a highly professional editorial board and reviewers that can help to improve the munscripts by valuable comments.

It is complicated factors, history, quality, moneywise, stability and techinology access, all these factors leading the journals to have IF but with future, I will see that some journals from other regions will of course, be in top, it is a matter of time. If we go back 20 or 40 years back, we can see the difference and the changing now.

talking about Indian Journal, I will like to share my experience about "Current Science" started in 1932 it published it publishes every fortnight. 2011 IF is 0.932

it's quite tough to publish in this journal as standard is quite high than other indian journals, still many Indians rather choose other journals with more tough procedure. reason is its availability to others. why publish in those journals whom very few cite. Current Science is not indexed in Pubmed, resulting in less citation of authors who publishes in it. many years back I asked editor what is the reason that this good journal is still suffering these issues, I got no reply.

Indians not more keen in publishing and patenting even our funding agencies not want that our research is to mainly focus on application oriented. we do not focus on basic science because still India is developing country we need more application oriented research. because need is mother of invention.....