IntroductionA colleague recently proposed submitting an article about work to which my lab had contributed to the journal Neurology. I said, Neurology is a fine journal—some of my favorite authors have published there (smile)—but, like many traditional journals, they don't allow authors to re-use their own words for future book chapters. That's true even if a pre-publication version ends up later on PubMed Central. At least, they don't allow this without their deciding whether to deign to grant permission in each case. It may surprise you to know that many traditional / "hybrid" journals that tout an Open Access option—usually an expensive one—allow only a noncommercial license (like the CC BY-NC license). That sounds fine until you learn that adapting your own words to contribute to a book or to a site like eMedicine counts as commercial use! Personally, in an age in which the "Paper User Interface" is almost obsolete, and I almost always find papers from PubMed or Google, giving my rights away to a journal (by copyright transfer or an exclusive license to publish) is just ridiculous.I replied to my colleague suggesting she submit instead to a journal that allowed the authors to re-use their own words freely (as with the CC BY license), and went on to explain other benefits of fully open access publishing. I've discussed some of these advantages elsewhere \cite{25580234}. She replied, "I'm curious to know how publishing in these open access platforms has been received by your department? There's a clear message in mine that they want to see pubs in journals with good impact factors, especially for promotion consideration." This is a reasonable concern, of course, and a common one, and I acknowledged that at my career stage the pressure is not on me to the same extent. But I gave her some thoughts anyway, and then I realized that others might find them interesting. So here they are.The real answerThe real answer is for leaders to judge papers (much less faculty) on different metrics. The JIF was never meant to grade the quality of an individual paper, and it does it poorly. Even collectively, higher impact factor journals are more likely to publish articles that are retracted than are lower impact factor journals (among other reasons, think about this: “novel” results imply a lower prior probability of truth). Besides, if by impact you mean total number of citations, some OA journals are way in front (e.g. Frontiers in Psychology is the most cited multidisciplinary psychology journal in the world, and there have been something over 200,000 citations to articles in PLOS ONE).Being down on the journal impact factor (JIF) is not just my opinion. You can listen to some Nobel laureates criticizing it here.Some young scientists are adopting an open-only policy and let the chips fall where they may, and several of these scientists have been quite successful. In the meantime . . .But in the meantime, here are some options for those in my colleague's position. First, there are open access  journals with a high JIF. Here is a short list of a few open access journals I've published in or considered, to show the wide range of JIFs for journals that allow authors to keep their rights: