With overwhelming thousands of online journals daily, many scholarly articles simply never reach their intended audience and consequently fail to generate the impact they deserve. Traditionally, scholarly publishers ensured the visibility of an authors’ work by circulating print journals to targeted readers. But fewer people are reading print journals anymore and as content continues to migrate from print to online — how can researchers optimize electronic distribution of content? A simple answer is: The most well known way of getting your paper cited is publishing a paper in a Open Access journal based on disciplinary reputation or with a high impact factor.
Increased access => Increased downloads => Increased citations => Increased impact!