Openness and quality of a published article | SciELO in Perspective

"When you speak to academics and ask what is important in the scholarly literature, you most often hear 'quality'. It is why they submit their articles to certain journals and not to others (at least that’s what they say). But it seems that nobody can define what ‘quality’ means in the context of scholarly literature. What is mentioned is ‘journal brand’ or ‘Impact Factor’, or even ‘established journal’. This perception that just the fact that a journal is well known, or long established amounts to ‘quality’ is particularly difficult for new journals, or platforms, which operate on a model that ensures full open access from the point of publication ('born open'), as by their very nature of being new, they are not ‘long established’ and have not had time to build up brand recognition, let alone a high Impact Factor. That is a problem, as those new journals and platforms (which are publication venues without a circumscribed subject matter ‘scope’ and don’t want to be known as ‘journals’) can represent a significant increase in efficiency of the published scientific discourse, and a substantial decrease in overall costs to the scholarly community. But is it right that those new initiatives shouldn’t be seen as having enough ‘quality’? ..."