Eco-Evo Evo-Eco: Where to submit your paper. Or “If at first you don’t succeed, fail fail again … then try open access”

"The confluence of two experiences motivated this post. First, I was involved in a conversation on Twitter (below) that was reacting to suggestions (in a commentary in Nature) that the high volume of open-access papers was the cause of the reviewer fatigue that so often bedevils journals and editors (such as myself). At one point in this thread, someone pointed to a blog post titled 'Why I Published in PLoS ONE. And Why I Probably Won’t Again for Awhile.' The main point of that post was to contrast the desire of young scientists to better the world by publishing in open-access journals with the perception that senior scientists don’t view a paper published in open-access journals as equivalent to a paper published in a more traditional journal. This latter sentiment was similar to my own experience on search committees in which candidates would be considered less impressive if they published too much in open-access journals ... The second motivation came from our weekly lab meetings. Near the start of each meeting, we go around the room asking 'Who had a paper or proposal accepted or published this week?' And then, after a hopefully long discussion, we ask, 'Who had a paper or proposal rejected this week?' I kind of like this two-part question because it enables us to get excited about our successes while also making the failures seem more acceptable. ('Oh, it happened to her too, so my own rejection is OK.') And we can also complain about reviewers and can discuss how we will make our papers better in response. It just so happens that, over the past few months, no one has been able to speak up for the first question and pretty much everyone has spoken up for the second. One lab member even noted that rejection seemed to be a recent trend in the lab.  These two experiences led me to consider the question: “Should you – as a young scientist – take the easy route and publish in open-access journals, or the hard route (likely entailing multiple rejections) of trying more traditional journals, either the big boys or the classic society-based journals?” First, let’s consider the benefits of open access. The basic idea is, of course, that everyone will see the paper and you won’t waste your time cycling through journals that don’t think your paper is 'important enough.' Moreover, citation rates are pretty decent for open-access journals, right? At least, that’s what everyone says. I would like to put this presumption to the test based on my own experiences.  I have published three papers in PLoS ONE (and several in other open-access journals). I quite liked all three papers and first tried traditional journals, but the papers were rejected a few times and the students wanted to move on with their lives and research, so we sent them toPLoS ONE, which accepted them quickly ..."