the vision
and memory lab

Last updated: July 2026

This page shows impact factors, h5-index and h5-medians for a set of journals in cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience and vision science, together with their open-access status and cost. This shouldn't be taken as an endorsement of impact-factor metrics: it mostly reflects the fact that these things matter in the current academic environment. The hope is that comparing the cost and openness of different journals can encourage publishing not only in high-impact venues but also in ones that are reasonably priced and support open sharing of science (Though preprints are allowed for nearly all journals, and solve most open access issues as well!).

Remember that different fields have different citation norms, so comparing impact factors across fields isn't very meaningful (equally strong neuroscience journals carry much higher impact factors than psychology journals). Journals that publish a lot of work in unrelated fields (e.g., Current Biology, Nature Communications) also have impact factors that don't reflect the psychology and neuroscience work they publish. Impact factor is the average influence of an article; h5-index and h5-median instead reflect a journal's total citation volume.

'Fully open access' journals (highlighted  green ) make every article freely available; the listed cost is the article processing charge (APC). For 'hybrid' subscription journals, the cost shown with an asterisk (*) is the fee to make a single article open access. A few (mostly society) journals also levy a base publication fee on every accepted article regardless of open access — listed beneath the open-access cost; most journals charge nothing to publish non-open-access. 'Green' open access — depositing a preprint (e.g., PsyArXiv, bioRxiv) — is free for essentially all of these journals and isn't shown; post your papers as preprints!