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ImmunoHorizons: an attractive OA journal published by AAI

Papers
#1

Hello all!

Many people in this community publish in Frontiers In Immunology. We’ve had a reasonably good experience publishing in this journal and have enjoyed reading papers in the journal. However, it’s a fully corporate borderline-spam journal.

If you aren’t aware, ImmunoHorizons is a fully open access journal put out by AAI. It appears to have these advantages:

  • Not terribly expensive. Publication costs $1,595.00, which is cheaper than Frontiers ($2,950!). Note that JI ends up being quite expensive if you have color figures, supplementary material, etc.
  • It’s a society journal, so your money is going somewhere good
  • Initial submission need not conform to any particular format
  • Uses Creative Commons 4 licensing.

Would anyone care to comment on their experiences with this journal? Do people have other suggestions for fully OA journals to use? PeerJ has a stunningly good experience but I doubt many will hop on that bandwagon.

Ideally, we’d be able to submit manuscripts in LaTeX, which actually did work with JI given a little begging.

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#2

I’m not sure that the best way to boost a new journal is to call another journal spam. I’d maybe edit out that sentence in your post. Especially, as at least in Immunology, the frontiers journal has a higher impact factor than JI. Maybe because for non AAI members it’s much easier (technically at least) to publish in, and all the published papers are free to read to everyone. The Frontiers organization is problematic, and it’s nice the AAI is thinking of an open access option, but from there to labeling it spam - sounds a bit harsh.

Regardless, good luck to ImmunoHoriozons! it’s about time there was a seriously backed immunology journal that had on it’s masthead that it wants to publish - "observations of interest " as well as “computational methods and tools”

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#3

Thank you for your thoughts, @uri.hershberg.

I think of “spam” as being a technical term here: a spam journal is a journal that profits by accepting some papers of questionable quality. From what I have read that describes Frontiers.

Again, I have read many top-quality papers in FI, do not think less of a paper because it is in FI, and I am happy that we chose to publish there.

However, I’m not convinced that the financial motivations are correctly arranged, just as they aren’t for other for-profit journals. Thus I think that the “borderline-spam” term is appropriate, but would be happy to be convinced otherwise.

#4

If i thought it was a spam journal I would not publish there. I think the frontiers journals are a mixed bag. it depends on the field and the people running the topic. i think the immunology one (the only one relevant here) publishes good papers (you seem to agree).

#5

I have chosen Frontiers in Immunology for my publication on a new version of Interleukin-10 based on one previous very good experience during the review process which was very good pointing out weaknesses of the first submission leading to improvements of the publication. I would prefer a Journal independently managed from a scientist run organization.
I am sure you find good and not so good papers in many Journals, even in Journals with very high impact factors.

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