Absolutely Alex. I have been arguing this for ages on various websites, in places I work,  and soon in print. Believe me, many people find this whole debate confronting. Many older folks just say they 'know' what the key journals are.  But I just reviewed many applicants for shortlisting at another university for example, and I always make my point - it behooves those making decisions on applicants or promotion cases to READ the work to assess it, not assume it is great because of the journal it is in, and simply reward  'top journals'.  Top journals are to be rewarded and are well curated of course, but so is ethical publishing. Publishing justly is just as important  - for the simple reason that you may CHOOSE the latter. But I recommend spelling this out clearly in applications so committees can see and read.   Now we just have to convince about a thousand other professors.

3 caveats
- some commercial journals provide some income to professional societies, others do not . And there are different pricing mechanisms and costs. There isn't a good/bad binary, basically. Some indeces of just/unjust publishers are being developed to help, but not ready. People write to me ever week about such issues, but there is little concrete to say.
- The discourse of journal prestige differs from the reality, and it's not as if publishing in DIY and 'flipped' publishing efforts are always likely to cause harm to a career. For example, if you check Scopus citescore, you will find our citation index at the Journal of Political Ecology (produced on my laptop and uploaded to the University of Arizona library with no budget) sits above Environment and Planning A,B,C and D [sadly now taken over by Sage, and setting up E as well], Geographical Journal, and many others with longer histories and more articles. Conservation and Society (free online) is way high. Maybe we should market such success - it is actually remarkable how low the citations are for some journals.  Only the STEM ones are really high. But we could perhaps just ignore all these scores in human geography and just read the work. In the UK, thank goodness, you will need only a small number of really good articles for the next research assessment, and fortunately they will be read by a committee.
- I had no idea about this stuff when I was younger - I had some idea about how awful Pergamon was under Robert Maxwell, and the 'selling of Antipode to Blackwell' story was of course known to anyone that went to Clark, that was about it. I also got my first job in a College of HE (teaching focus) at the dawn of the internet in '93 and with hardly any publications written or required. The 'Academic Spring' had not begun. So I do not speak from personal experience of the current much harsher environment-my PhD students do.

https://journalmetrics.scopus.com/ Citations 2016 Snowball Metrics
1       Journal of Political Ecology 2.08
2       Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2.06
3       Environment and Planning A 1.64
4       Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 1.59
5       Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 1.41


Date:    Thu, 21 Sep 2017 10:58:39 +0200
From:    Alex Mahoudeau <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: The case for colonialism

Hello all,

Regarding that point, and if I may be the annoying one in this plan, as
early-career researchers if we "look down" on big publishers' journals we
then look down on having jobs and other commodities such as homes and food,
since the attribution of said jobs is for a big part dependent upon our
capacity to publish in said journals. I say that while being favourable to
the escape from this consortium, but this is the answer to "Why oh why
critical social scientists keep publishing in those".

Now the advantage is that the persons in charge of setting the criteria for
recruitment are our senior peers, although they are still constrained in
their own ways I am sure. The first step is not the creation of independent
journals, even though independent journals are necessary. The first step is
the creation of a system which encourages people who participate to
independent journals.

Anyway, I'm sure the issue is more complicated than that, but I thought it
was worth reminding.

Best,

AM