Ever heard of the Ingelfinger rule? Most journals will not publish something if they find out it’s already been put on a blog.

But blogging is not one of the things by which I am judged professionally.

Dr. Gunn :

Surely you don’t mean that if someone blogs their research, then subsequently publishes and the paper is widely cited, that only after publication it is worthwhile?

Surely I *do* mean that. P&T committees do not consider blog writing to be a publication. Grant review panels don’t consider blogging to be a publication. The latter determine whether you have money to do your job and the former whether you actually have a job (usually based upon how much money you get from the latter). So peer-reviewed publications are the fundamental career-scientist coinage. As far as blogging is concerned, the value in this context are nil. There may be other values to blogging such as making yourself known “out there”, networking, recruitment etc.

Whether that is a good or bad situation may be argued about, but there it is.

People blog their research all the time, too. I published a method for fluorescently staining osteoclasts in paraffin embedded bone sections to the prestigious journal of My Blog and then subsequently in an open access journal (pending).

“In today terms what is needed to run a simple publishing company?”

I was saying to my students yesterday that if I wanted to, I could probably start a new online journal for $50. Buy a domain name and some server space, ask a few colleagues to start reviewing manuscripts, and away you go.

On the other hand, if I were to want to launch a journal that actually distributed archival print copies to libraries around the world… that would be more expensive.

There might be a perceived difference in credibility because of that.

You’re also right that niche journals are a different ecosystem altogether. The majority of OA journals do not charge any author-side fees at all (see, e.g. here), and there are >4400 entries in the Directory of OA Journals. My best estimate from Ulrich’s is that there are around 15,000 peer-reviewed STM journals, so TA outweighs OA but only by ~2:1 — once we get away from the Cell/Nature/Science fixation, surely somewhere in the DOAJ there is a no-fee OA alternative for most TA niche journals?

That makes the price competition moot — or turns it on its head, since most TA journals do charge at least some author-side fees (see the Kaufman-Wills study linked in my first link above). If you’re really hard up, surely a journal which charges you nothing at all is the best choice — and that is more likely to be a no-fee OA than a TA journal.