The vast majority of people looking at your publications are not going to give a hoot if your paper was published in one of these online journals or another outlet. Nearly all journals today are online journals in spirit because nearly all journals have an online presence with online access to articles either via pay or open access policies. All of the journals you name are legitimate, most have good reputations or virtually no reputation (SR). Whether a journal is open access or not is irrelevant from a quality standpoint. There are crap open-access journals and crap print journals, likewise, their are very good open access journals and print journals. Recently Nature elicited an attack on open access journals. But you must remember that fake articles submitted to journals can get through peer review. A recent publication I posted earlier demonstrated that 120 fake articles made it through peer review on Springer and IEEE in computer science journals. That is amazing because the IEEE outlets in particular are for computer scientists and engineers what Ecology, American Naturalist, and similar journals are to ecologists. Things do get through, but they should not. I am 90% sure we had a fake submission this year at HCB, and we rejected it.
PLoS and PLoS One The PLoS journals have a good reputation period by anyone who understands what is going on in modern journal publishing. Of the PLoS journals, PLoS One is probably the least respected, I will not address all the reasons, but a primary reason is the falling impact factor associated with its growing volume. However, anyone with a basic understanding of how impact factor is calculated will recognize that a journal that is growing as rapidly as PLoS One will always haave a suppressed impact factor because the impact factor is essentially a mean. A mean is an appropriate central tendency measure for a parametric distribution, but not a distribution that is a power curve, which citation magnitude certainly is. This feeds into the growth of PLoS One. Because citation rate is a power curve, and because the papers published in the most recent year are always way more than the number of papers published in the first year of the two year impact factor, the opportunity for citation is not evenly distributed between the 2 year old and 1 year old articles. This is why the impact factor is suppressed. The growth of PLoS One is a sigmoid curve, and if you look at the trajectory for this year, it will likely have a very slightly larger number of submissions this year relative to last year, it is now approaching the assymptotic portion of the sigmoid curve in that publishing numbers is probably going to level off now. That will cause the impact factor to rise likely back into the 4s. The reptuation of PLoS Biology and the other PLoS Journals are very high. One thing to remember about PLoS One is that the other PLoS journals funnel papers below their standards to this journal if they believve it is a publishable paper. Why? I suspect it is because papers submitted to the other PLoS Journals are likely to have cited PLoS articles. By directing these into PLoS One this will help rise the impact rating of the other PLoS Journals. This is very common among publishers today. ALSO, PLoS journals publish as accepted, this reduces their impact rating relative to say Springer journals who pre-release articles 6 mo early. That 6 mo window provides an extra 6 mo of citations without eaating up time time on the 2 year impact factor clock. I expect this game to be circumvented by Thomson-Reuters Journal Citation Reports, but maybe they don't care. PEERJ I submitted a paper on occupational health to PEERJ about 6 months ago, and it got a very very good peer review. The editor handling my paper was literally the top expert in the topic I was covering, which is why I actually sent it there. PEERJ has no impact factor, and much of the expectations of PEERJ is that it will be similar to PLoS One. The big advantage of PEERJ is its publishing costs and based on the articles that I have seen related to my interests, they ahve been pretty good. I expect it to be in some ways better than PLoS One because so many universities are signing on a group plan. However, you also have to question if this is a sustainable model. Online presence is pretty cheap, so I expect it will be...or they will raise the price, change policies! Ecosphere I have never used this journal for my own output, but I have read articles in it and cited many. The quality seems to be pretty damn good. Scientific Reports I don't think this outlet has the name recognition of the above journals. I can't recall ever citing anything from it, and I recently read a human genetics article in it that I sent to "Highly Respected Geneticist who is a member of the NAS" asking his view, and I'll just say it was not very well received! Notice, all journals publish their share of bad papers, and I can't recall any of these having to pull a manuscript for ethical reasons (faked data). I PERSONALLY see no advantage to sending a paper to SR over the other outlets you named. My personal opinion on submitting to journals Select your journal based on the audience you hope to attract, the media impact you think might be possible, and the overall quality of the journal. Lets say you had a paper in conservation of cumquats. You look at your results and say, this is extremely important for Conservation Biologists, but I doubt anyone in the general public will care. Then send it to Conservation Biology or Biological Conservation. But, if you look at it and think the general public will also be interested, you might choose to send it to a more general outlet that gets good media exposure. However, you might be attacking the work of the current editor of the journal! Then you might still opt for the less ideal outlet. The most critical point will be the quality of the journal, which you can only define based on your own and your main research groups' vision of quality. Its not black and white. One well-funded scientist I know publishes almost all his papers in the same 1-2 journals. But, most try to spread it around. Another point when you publish in regard to audience that is currently ignored and becoming obsolete. It used to be that if you paper was a state issue, you sent it to the state academy, if a regional issue, you sent it to a regional journal, if a national issue you sent it to a national journal, and if international you sent it to an international journal. That entire scope has decayed at least partly because of Thomson-Reuter's past policies on selecting journals for inclusion combined with authors who are forced to seek higher impact ratings, something I believe is unfortunate. Mostly, you now try to get your paper into the highest rated journal you can. This causes people to shoot the moon too often, clogging up the peer review process, delaying publication of manuscripts, and ultimately slowing science. A few years back I sent a paper to Science and it got rejected w/o review, big deal. Then, I sent it to Conservation Biology and it got rejected without review. In both cases they said the article had "too limited of a focus for their general audience." I ultimately sent it to Journal of Herpetology where it got published. You know what? It is either the most cited paper or the second most cited paper published since 2007, it has been cited more than something like 90% of papers from 2007 referenced in the Web of Science, and its been cited more than 1/3 of papers published in Science in 2007! That is as of 2012. I have not checked since. The reason I bring this up is not to wave a flag or brag. Its to point out that if your paper is a solid article with solid results, people will notice and it will get its due justice. There is a point where published is better than being in review. Being published means you complete what you start. That is the ultimate point. Whether it be a tiny note or a mega monograph, if you spent your time starting it, and you have results, it should be published somewhere. Finish what you start. Sometimes people may ask why you spent that time publishing the tiny insignificant note. My response? Because I finish what I start. Being a finisher is a good habit. Allowing things to site for years and then get lost to science and society is a very very bad habit. The latter also creeps into other things. Well, my paragraph note is not important, I'll just leave it sit. Next thing its 1 page notes, then 5 page papers, the 20 page papers, then you are sitting in your office complaining about how you don't have resources to do the research you want to do because you only want to do research that results in treatises requiring your own private research facility. If you have something to publish, and you think it is worthy of landiing in "BIG JOURNAL" send it there and work your way down the chain. But, if you look at your study and see it is probably only of interest to cumquat growers, you might send it to cumquat growers quarterly. Either way, you are published, and with the large quantity of scientists who are unable to publish due to ability, health, time, or resources, no one should complain you are maintaining your productivity. However, as you migrate to seasoned scientist it is expected that you have landed papers in the best outlets in your field. WHat those are depends on your field. Landing in Science or Nature is partly talent, partly salesmanship, and partly luck. I know too many people who never get their, and too many people who its hard to believe they ever did! :) I hope this is helpful, I also hope that the alternative views will be posted because it is important for you to get all sides of this argument so you can come to your own conclusions about publishing and decide what you will find most rewarding in the short and long run. On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 8:22 AM, Nathan Lemoine <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey ECOLOGers, > > I have a question regarding the perception of publishing in open-access > journals. First, I really like the idea behind PLoS and PeerJ (particularly > PeerJ, due to its more reasonable price). These journals makes science > accessible to those who are interested but can't afford the pricey > subscription tag of for-profit journals, and it does work. PLoS is cited by > popular magazines (like Men's Health), I hear it referred to on podcasts > where the speaker cites an article from PLoS. I see references to PLoS > everywhere in the popular literature, etc., much more so than traditional > journals. It's pretty amazing how widely read it is. > > In theory, it'd be a great principle to adopt a "publish only in open-access > journals" philosophy. I'm wondering how this would be received. If someone > submits a post-doc, faculty, or grant application with only PLoS, PeerJ, > Ecosphere, Scientific Reports, etc. articles, would that place them behind > others with the same quantity of publications (and ostensibly same quality of > work) in more established journals? I get the sense that it might, which may > discourage grad students and other early-career individuals from publishing > more in these journals who typically want to have high-impact and > well-recognized publications. Am I correct on this, or are times changing? > > Nate -- Malcolm L. McCallum Department of Environmental Studies University of Illinois at Springfield Managing Editor, Herpetological Conservation and Biology "Nothing is more priceless and worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed. It is a many-faceted treasure, of value to scholars, scientists, and nature lovers alike, and it forms a vital part of the heritage we all share as Americans." -President Richard Nixon upon signing the Endangered Species Act of 1973 into law. "Peer pressure is designed to contain anyone with a sense of drive" - Allan Nation 1880's: "There's lots of good fish in the sea" W.S. Gilbert 1990's: Many fish stocks depleted due to overfishing, habitat loss, and pollution. 2000: Marine reserves, ecosystem restoration, and pollution reduction MAY help restore populations. 2022: Soylent Green is People! 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