Authoring a PhD

Professional ownership versus commercial ownership
.
In general, journals run by professional bodies in each of the
disciplines have higher prestige than those which are chiefly set
up by commercial publishers and entrepreneurial academics to
earn a major buck. Professional journals are normally supplied
free to members of the professional association as part of their
overall subscription, which tends to mean that far more indi-
vidual readers in at least its home country will routinely notice
that your paper has been published. There are far fewer indi-
vidual subscriptions to commercial journals, and so readers
mainly have to come across your paper in the library or look it
up directly. The chief reasons why people find your material are
because they regularly search particular journals’ electronic
contents; because a colleague or the journal’s e-mail alerting
service draws their attention to it; or because they are starting a
new article or research project of their own and hence are doing
a systematic literature trawl.