Does journal access significantly influence choice in which journal to publish in?

I've asked many professors why they submit to journal X instead of journal Y. Reasons given include:

• Geographic location (e.g. British astronomers are more likely to submit to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society simply because that's a British journal)
• Impact factor
• Scope (certain journals are more theoretical than others, certain topics are just historically published in certain journals, etc)
• Habit / familiarity (if I am familiar with a journal's style, publishing there saves time)
• Personal knowledge of the editors
• Open access (although the professors I spoke to were not concerned about whether their paper would be OA; they were more concerned about publishing in subscription journals, just so they wouldn't have to figure out the open access APC)

Journal access is never cited.

As for why publish open access vs. closed access, see: Why do tenured professors still publish in pay-walled venues?

As far as I know, the choice of a journal has no demonstrated effect on citations. (Having your paper in a preprint archive does boost citations though.) Some people seek journals with high impact factors or high prestige when this can improve their career prospects, although judging a paper from the journal it appears in is widely considered as bad practice. A number of researchers do care about publishers' practices with respect to pricing and open access, cf the longstanding boycott of Elsevier. They do this for the moral reason of helping improve the system, even though this can be detrimental to their careers. (Not very detrimental in most cases, as there are so many journals out there.)

I think in the times of internet "journal access" is not really the practical bottleneck anymore that someone can and will read your paper somehow, rather the criterions Allure has listed.

The bigger technical bottlenecks for someone to spot and download your paper are:

• is the journal indexed by google scholar, scopus, ISI, sci-hub (lawsuit with Elsevier to my knowledge)...
• can someone easily find your research via above tools by few keywords without search operators (most people still don't use operators!!!)
• do you actively disseminate your publications on researchgate, private/institute website, conferences, so researchers could become aware of it

So these points will converge to "access/visibilty" of your paper and the main bottleneck is that there is much more noise around the information you want to find nowadays and often you cannot restrict yourself to reading half a dozen journals in your field to stay up to date, especially on interdisciplinary news. I have changed and strengthened very much my kind of literature search over the past decade due to this fact.

For a young researcher it's in my opinion also more important to bring your results to more journals at the beginning of your career, get invited to review for them and not look too much on impact and accessibilty, you have to build a network and I think professors can have very different search and readings habits in their limited time in comparison to someone working solely on one topic (postdoc, PhD). At least my Professor and me often recommend very complementary papers to each other :-) I often read much more experimentally linked literature, while he interdisciplinary/thematically.