In my answer I am using the term chromatography inclusively (low pressure liquid, HPLC, gas, ion exchange, affinity, immunoaffinity, thin layer etc).  I have not previously considered submitting a methods paper for chromatography although I use it extensively in my research and commercial operations.  I detail such methods, when appropriate, within my publications. You are quite right that there are few recent publications which deatail chromatography methods, applications and trouble shooting when problems arise.  There is, however, considerable promotional methods material available as a starting point for one who is not experienced in chromatography in their area of research.  For example, BioRad and Pharmacia Corp (purchased by Pfizer) provide extensive methods to support the sale of their chromatography matrices.  As chromatography is only one of the methods needed to purify or characterise the specific component of interest I would be hard pressed to generate a manuscript other than a review article which would be additive to the currently known methods.  I will follow this question to see how our colleagues respond.

It is not surprising to find only few chromatography papers in such open access journals as they are general ones and not specialized in chromatography.

As they have large impact factors, publications in these journals is ok, but I recommend to publish in specialized chromatography journals which have also large impact factors.

Thank you for your answers!!

Does it really matter if a journal is specialized for chromatography? E.g. I hardly search for papers in the journals themselves. Instead I search e.g. Pubmed or Google Scholar.

Regarding impact factor, OA journals such as Scientific Reports (~5) and E-Life (~8) outperform most chrom. journals, and are free for all to read. So why chose a specialized journal? (I must admit I am playing devil advocate here:))

Dear Farooq, thank you for the input! I think your mail might be telltale to why  those who define themselves as chromatographers, use closed traditional journals; maybe they feel they are writing for each other, where they can safely go in to detail about method parameters without being met with yawns? I think this is the case in most fields, actually.

However, there are major advances for metabolomics and proteomics etc. that are being made because of innovations in chromatography. E.g. monoliths, UPLC, ultra-narrow LC, 2D LC etc. allow for maximum output from the MS, moving the field towards mapping the human proteome, or single cell analysis.

Considering the importance on so many fields, I would think that novel approaches in chromatography could deserve a larger audience. I mean, biologists are well trained in the usefulness, output and potential of electrophoresis, real time PCR etc. but look like question marks when LC-MS is mentioned (and added to their paper).

Therefore, I encourage chromatographers to publish in OA journals, and let their work be more familiar/accessible t fellow researchers!

Actually there is greater degree of need to sensitize researchers from pure and applied sciences about the advantages of open access publishing over the closed or subscribed ones. with regard to choosing high impact factor journals for publishing ones research results, it may not be inappropriate to say that these metrics are easily exploited by the publishers as per their convenience. Self-citation is one of the age old practice used to increase the impact factor of journals.

Open access journals should be the most preferred journals among the research community to publish their research results.  OA publishing not only helps increase the visibility of your research paper but also benefits the end user the most, especially over the closed access journals. OA publishing also helps to increase the so called Impact factor and h-index of author, as more and more researchers will be able to access ur findings and refer to same in their new research results. subscribed journals more often defeat the purpose for which research is under taken for want of restricted access and delayed delivery, while as OA is always timely, freely available and hence serves the best purpose for which research is meant.

Lastly, Most of the research across globe is funded by public money through government and their agencies, given this fact public has got every right to know about the research results which has been under taken on their money. why should public pay for those research results which has been undertaken for them as end users and has been undertaken on their money.   so OA publishing is always preferred over the CA publishing.

Dear Ramesh, thank you for your thoughts! I especially agree that when the public has payed for the science, they should be able to access it as well.

Open access journal help in spreading the knowledge.However, some of these journals published a low quality Articles for financial reasons.

I will choose an open access journal for my chromatography manuscript, it is much better and help in spreading the knowledge (@Haitham Hmoud Alshibly).