Listening to Bruce Dancik's talk about choosing a juornal and submitting your manuscript got me thinking about issues he didn't emphasize. I started with a few, but my list keeps getting longer and longer;
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Issues:
Likelihood of acceptance: Do your subject, approach and results fit the mandate of the
journal (is yours the kind of manuscript they’re looking for)?
Prestige for your CV: How good is the journal's reputation? What about its impact factor?
Prestige for journalists: Are papers from this journal often reported in the mainstream media?
Readership: narrow specialized topic, or broad area of science?
Ease of finding for readers: Is the journal indexed by everything? How well can you use keywords in the
title and abstract to bring in readers from Google Scholar and other search
engines?
Cost of publishing: Page charges? Open access
fees?
Open access: Immediate open access? Open
access after 6 months or a year? Subscription
only? If subscription access, how widely
is it subscribed to?
Online supplementary materials: Hosted? Not
allowed?
Limits on article length: No limit? Very
tight?
Copyright and licensing: Must you sign away your rights? Can others reuse your material (e.g. your figures)?
Turnaround time: Rapid pre-screening? Total
time from submission to publication? Online early access?
Sleaziness of publisher? Elsevier? Other
for-profit? Society journal? Predatory publisher?
Type of publication: Online-only? Print edition
only? Both?
Tiresomeness of Instructions to Authors:
News and Views or other promotion:
