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Discussions of the potential of open access publishing frequently must contend with the skepticism of research authors regarding the need to pay author fees (also known as publication fees). With that in mind, the authors undertook a survey of faculty, postdocs, and graduate students in physical science, mathematics, and engineering fields at two research universities (Cornell University and Syracuse University) asking for their experience with and opinion of paying author fees for publication of research in open access journals. The results of this survey indicated that most respondents had not decided against publishing in an open access journal due to the author fee requirement. Those who had paid them only requested or received coverage for those fees in grant line-items or from institutional sources in a few cases. Responses seemed to combine cautious optimism about open access journals with intense skepticism about their quality and intense opposition to the idea of having to pay any additional costs from their own pockets.

In 2012, this author published a paper describing a method for using the raw data from Web of Science to examine the journals cited by any given group of researchers and then compare that list to lists of 'top journals' of similar disciplines. It was not a straightforward method to use and required a great deal of effort and spreadsheet work by a user in order to properly deploy. Since that time, the Scopus database has made available a workflow that vastly simplifies--and, indeed, improves--this process. In this paper, a method of using Scopus to generate expanded lists of highly cited journals within specific research communities and the comparison of those with published lists of journals for similar disciplines is described. The value of finding these top-cited journals in research communities may be useful to librarians making collection development decisions.

Quantitative measurements can be used to yield lists of top journals for individual fields. However, these lists represent assessments of the entire "universe" of citation. A much more involved process is needed if the goal is to develop a nuanced picture of what a specific group of authors, such as an academic department, is citing. This article presents a method for using ISI Web of Science in conjunction with spreadsheet management to compare lists of top journals from ISI and Eigenfactor with the journal titles that a list of authors are citing in their own publications. The resulting data can be used in collection development, departmental contacts, and in assessing the research interests of an academic department. (Contains 3 figures.)