How do you choose a journal when it’s time to submit a paper? | Scientist Sees Squirrel

ab1630's bookmarks 2018-06-20

Summary:

"Having lots of options is a wonderful thing – right up until you have to pick one.  Have you ever been torn among the two dozen entrées on a restaurant menu? Blanched at the sight of 120 different sedans on a used-car lot? If you have, you might also wonder how on earth you’re going to choose a journal to grace with your latest manuscript.  There are, quite literally, thousands of scientific journals out there – probably tens of thousands – and even within a single field there will be hundreds of options.  (Scimago lists 352 journals in ecology, for example, but that list is far from comprehensive.) What follows are some of things I think you might consider when you choose a journal.  There’s  no single “right” choice for any manuscript, because there are multiple factors at play and how you weight them will depend on things like your career stage, your budget, your coauthors, and more.  But a little systematic thought can at least narrow the field. By the way: I’m pretty sure that parts of this post will make some people very, very angry.  I’ll be mentioning impact factor, and open-access publication, and a couple of other things, and I may not stick entirely to the sacredly anointed proper positions on them.  Failure to stick to those sacredly anointed proper positions seems to provoke incoherent rage rather than thoughtful argument in a few people.  If you’re one of those people, you might prefer to read something else.  Here’s one of my least controversial posts....

Open-access vs. subscription. There are two fundamentally different ways in which journals distribute papers. If your paper is published “open-access”, it’s released free (online) to anyone at any time; but if your paper is in a subscription journal, it’s released (directly) only to those who pay for a journal subscription***.  (To make this a little more complicated, many subscription journals have open-access publishing options, although usually at substantial cost.)  It seems like an obvious proposition that open-access is better, and all else being equal, it would be.  All else is rarely equal.  Publication costs must be recouped one way or the other, so open-access publication is generally more expensive than subscription-based publication.  A decision to publish open-access, then, is a decision to forgo spending the same research dollars elsewhere.  Which brings us to…..."

Link:

https://scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2018/06/19/how-do-you-choose-a-journal-when-its-time-to-submit-a-paper/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » ab1630's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.authors oa.ecr oa.gold oa.publishing oa.predatory oa.students oa.hei oa.quality oa.credibility oa.guides oa.journals

Date tagged:

06/20/2018, 18:46

Date published:

06/20/2018, 14:46