Are High Price Journals the Most Influential? - Enago Blog: Scientific Publication Help

"There is an old saying that 'you get what you pay for,' that is, a higher priced product is higher quality and worth the extra money. Open access journals vary greatly in the prices they charge to publish articles, from almost nothing to several thousand dollars. Are the higher priced journals worth the extra money? Quality vs. Publication Cost Jevin West, a researcher at the University of Washington, developed a tool to analyze the cost effectiveness of open access journals. The tool first rates journals by a score that considers how many citations the publications generate on average and how prestigious the journals are that cite them—a sort of weighted impact factor. After normalizing to give an average Article Influence (AI) of 1 for all journals analyzed, the data are plotted vs. cost of publication. The correlation between publication cost and AI is weak. There is a slight trend of higher AI with higher publication cost but what is remarkable is the scatter in the data. At every cost point in the plot there is a huge variation of AI—high, low, average. Some of the lowest price journals have among the highest AI; some of the highest priced journals have very low AI ..."