system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Will publishing in an Elsevier journal hurt my open science cred with people in-the-know?

I'm a 4th year PhD student, hoping to stay in academia. I picked a journal to target for the paper I'm currently writing because I found that a number of my sources were coming from a particular (Elsevier) journal, it seemed to align with what I was writing... and it had a high impact factor. When I talked about it with my supervisor, he was like, "Ew... Elsevier? Really? Well, if that's where it fits best..." and it made me stop and reconsider.

My country has subsidized open-access publishing through various deals, so as a PhD student I've been relatively insulated from these considerations. I just assumed all publishers were all more or less the same level of predatory and that I'd go with the flow, targeting the "top-tier" journal that was aligned with what I'd done.

Only I'm currently applying to a department with a hardcore Open Science push. I'd considered myself 100% aligned with this movement; I contribute to open source projects and have worked to develop anonymization techniques to encourage open data. But I hadn't considered that part of that was *intentionally* publishing in open-access only journals.

Honestly (and embarrassingly), I've been in the habit of excluding journals with an impact factor under 5 for career-advancement purposes. Now I'm re-evaluating this decision for exactly the same selfish reason.

tl;dr: If I care about open science *and also my career*, how do I weight publishing in high-impact-factor journals vs open-access-only journals? Are departments that are truly pursuing these aims already at the point where impact factor doesn't matter?  


Edit:  I will publish OA regardless of journal choice as that is a requirement of being government-funded. This is possible with Elsevier, but the costs are subsidized by the government. 

The issue at hand for me is whether publishing OA with Elsevier makes me seem like I'm not supportive of Open Science initiatives, and whether supporting OS is more important than getting publications in high Impact Factor journals.
gpt
I've never met anyone that holds it against another scientist for publishing in a for-profit journal. Even hardcore supporters of open access should be aware that an early career scientist has relatively fewer options to publish.