Bearing in mind that there are lies, damned lies and publication metrics (apologies to Benjamin Disraeli and Mark Twain), publishing in Elsevier journals may not be good for the health of your future citations.
The negotiations between the Dutch universities and Elsevier have foundered.
(here), which means that form 1 January 2015, Dutch researchers will no longer have access to Elsevier journals. So a significant segment of the research community will only be able to access papers published in Elsevier journals by requesting a PDF directly. This works, though I note that for me e-mailing the authors has been more effective than #Icanhazpdf on Twitter, but then my K-index is pretty pathetic.
The result is that access, reading and so citation by Dutch researchers will become biased – with two equivalent papers to cite, one published by Elsevier and one published by ANOther, they will generally reach for the second.
To ensure a soaring h-index, the only solution is not to publish in Elsevier journals. If you tweet about your papers, doubtless your K-index will similarly soar and the outcome can only be “Trebles all round”.
More seriously, with librarians and more enlightened members of staff egging on university management to bite the bullet on academic publishing, I can only hope that where the Dutch venture, the rest of us will follow. We don’t actually need the closed access commercial model, we have plenty of publishing options with open access and learned society publishers and, as ever, it is the paper that counts, not the container.
Update: a very useful dataset on the cost to UK universities of subscriptions to Elsevier, Wiley and other commercial publishers is here. It is a lot of money!