Any reason for you to stick to plain JSP/JSTL? Most web frameworks would simplify this work for you. The key would be to have a templating system like tiles, sitemesh, facelet, freemarker, ...

JSP mechanism for nav bar template/module
I recently found out that a team of colleagues published in a journal without impact factor, though peer-reviewed. According to my supervisor this happens sometimes when the study cannot be published in a top journal, and then it could be better to do so than publish in a low profile journal whose impact factor would drag down the mean impact factor of the papers published by that team. 

Is this common? If so, which elements can specifically drive a research team to choose this option?
