What is the personal economic motivation and benefits (in the international community) to publish in good but non-SCI or non-SCI-Expanded journals?

Question

While SCI/SCIE journals (journals included in the Clarivate indices of Science Citation Index, Science Citation Index Expanded) are the gold list of journals and (my guess) the truly international science community considers only the publications that are published in the SCI/SCIE journals, there are some good or emerging journals which are not in SCI/SCIE. I know that some countries (e.g. Easter European countries) in their idiosyncratic evaluation systems allows the SCOPUS and other publications to count as real publications, as I understand, then the serious and international community considers only SCI/SCIE publications as serious ones which can be counted for the evaluation of research proposals, grant applications and position applications.

But as I said, then there are good journals outside SCI/SCIE as well. E.g. I am trying to do research in the nascent field of Artificial General Intelligence (e.g. there is Third Wave AI Campaign by US DARPA https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/ai-next-campaign) and Computational Creativity and I am looking on two journals in their respective fields: Journal of AGI https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/jagi/jagi-overview.xml and Journal of Computational Creativity https://jcc.computationalcreativity.net/. The first journal has rather long history and it has very high standard as I can judge from the published articles (this is my subjective evaluation, but I believe my gut feelings to distinguish bad research from the good one). But the other journal is still awaiting its first issue.

My senses (trying to be good person) advises me to prepare papers exactly for those 2 journals to support the community (of AGI and CC that is still growing and still awaiting status deserving to them), to support the status of the journal. But as those journals are not included in SCI/SCIE, then rationally thinking it would be waste of energy. Instead I can tweak my papers and submit them to the traditional journals (e.g. Cognitive Systems Research or Physics of Life Reviews by Elsevier).

But it is not an easy decision. When I am seeing that from time to time Journal of AGI still receives very high quality articles, I need to ask - why researcher still submitted to this journal knowing that his or her publication is not counted in the indices?

So - what is the personal economic (mercantile) motivation and benefits to publish in high-standard non-SCI/SCIE journals? I am interested only in the mercantile motivation as I clearly understand the social/emotional/moral motivation.

And just curios - why Journal of AGI is not listed in SCIE? Because it is small-scale journal (articles are published rarely)?

Answer 1

You are massively mistaken in your assumptions.

Generally, the experts know the rough reputation and standards of the publication venues in their area. If they are not familiar with a specific one, then looking at the recent papers and the editorial board, or asking colleagues will typically be preferred to a binary check of whether or not that venue is listed on a particular index. There certainly is a strong correlation between "is a reasonable journal" and "is listed in SCI/SCIE", but it is the former that matters, not the latter, when being evaluated by experts.

For grant applications, none of EPSRC (UK), Royal Society (UK), ERC, DFG (Germany), NWO (Netherlands) restrict applicants to only list publications in SCI-listed venues. As someone who was on the job market a few years ago, I've never seen any job advert asking for only SCI-listed publications either.

The UK has the Research Excellence Framework (REF), a huge exercise to judge research quality of all researchers at British Universities. Everyone submits their top 5 published papers, and there is again no restriction to SCI-listed venues.

I've been around in the CS/Math area for 12 years now, and in fact only directly encountered a situation where something being or not being listed on SCI(E) was relevant: We were planning a special issue dedicated to a conference, and as one of the prospective author was a Slovenian PhD student who needed SCI-listed publications to graduate, we picked a particular journal. For colleagues from South Africa and Russia, some journal indices seem to matter, too.

So unless you consider it likely that your academic career will substantially take place in a few select countries, it really won't matter whether the journals you publish in are SCI(E)-listed or not.

Answer 2

I disagree with others who say you are mistaken in your assumptions. There are many countries where SCI/SCIE indexed publications are the only publications considered in academic hiring, grant review, and advancement evaluations. Even in countries like the UK where this may not be an "explicit" standard, the majority (though not all) "highly respected" journals are already SCI/SCIE-indexed. Academic chauvinism exists in both explicit and implicit forms. However, I can think of a few reasons why it might personally benefit your grant or employment prospects to submit to a non-indexed journal:

(1) You believe/know that the journal will be indexed in a few years. This might happen if the journal is new, but is part of a suite of society journals where all of the other journals are indexed (i.e. if the American Chemical Society launched a new journal, it will definitely be indexed in a few years).

(2) If the journal as a whole is widely read/cited by your academic niche community, then even if your article is not explicitly taken into account by your university or grant agency, it can still increase your stature within your field, getting you invited talks, etc., or boosting the citation rates of your other SCI-indexed papers, and increasing your chances of receiving funding, positions, etc. through these "knock-on" effects.

(3) There would be social/relationship benefits. For example, there is a "big shot" in your field who's taken an interest in your work, perhaps they run their own journal that for various reasons might not be SCI-indexed (for example, it's a journal in the local language, like a Japanese-language journal). Thus, it might be important in the home-country's scientific community, but have little international reach. If that big shot invites you to submit something, then contributing an article to their journal is a great way to build your personal network. Later on, they might help you get shortlisted for a position at their university, give you an invited talk at a conference they're organizing, etc.

Answer 3

Possible reasons are:

• Invited by personal contacts (typically members of the editorial board of the journal).
• They believe the new journal will rise up the ranks quickly. This happened for, e.g., Nature Astronomy (which is in turn likely to rise up the ranks quickly because the journal is backed by Nature).
• Ideological reasons. Example, example.
• They don't think their paper is particularly good (or it has already been rejected by top journals) so they figure, why not.

That's about it.

With all due respect to the other answers, statements such as "If the journal as a whole is widely read/cited by your academic niche community ... " are misleading, because if the journal is widely read/cited by your academic niche community, it won't be very long before the journal ends up in the SCI or SCIE.