What Q1, Q2 and Open Access Actually Mean — Reading the Marks in Our Listings
The journal tables on this site carry marks such as "Q1" and "OA". Both speak directly to where you should submit your paper, and both are easy to misread.
What a quartile is
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) sorts journals into roughly 250 categories (Emergency Medicine, Surgery, and so on), ranks the journals within each category by Impact Factor (IF), and divides that ranking into four equal parts. The top 25% is Q1, followed by Q2, Q3, and the bottom 25% as Q4.
If the Emergency Medicine category holds about 55 journals, for example, the top 14 or so are Q1. In the 2025 JIF, an IF of roughly 3.5 or above was the rough threshold for Q1. The Oncology category, by contrast, contains more than 300 journals, and the Q1 boundary sits at an IF of about 6 to 7.
Because quartiles absorb the order-of-magnitude differences between fields, "Q1 in its field" communicates far better than "IF 4.1" when you are explaining your record to people outside your specialty — reviewers, department heads, promotion committees. Degree examinations and grant applications increasingly state "publication in a Q1 journal" as an explicit requirement.
Journals listed in more than one category
It is common for a single journal to be listed in more than one category. Resuscitation, for instance, appears in three — Emergency Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, and Cardiac & Cardiovascular Systems — with a different quartile in each. JCR conventionally presents the best of those quartiles as the headline figure, and publishers naturally advertise that number. Because our listings are organized by category, you may see the same journal shown with different Q values.
Journals whose quartile shows as "–"
We display a Q only when the quartile is stated in our source or can be determined with confidence from the IF value; everything else is shown as "–". A "–" does not mean Q4 — it means unconfirmed. For the exact quartile, check the publisher's page or JCR itself.
What open access means
An open access journal is one whose published papers anyone can read free of charge. Instead of readers paying a subscription, the dominant model has authors pay an article processing charge (APC). The "OA" mark in our listings is applied to fully open access journals, in which every paper is open access.
| Type | How it works | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Fully OA | Every paper freely available; APC required | Critical Care, BMC Emergency Medicine, Journal of Intensive Care, Scientific Reports |
| Hybrid | A subscription journal, but you can make your own paper OA by paying an APC | Resuscitation, Journal of Gastroenterology, Surgery Today, and most subscription journals |
| Diamond OA | A society or public body covers the costs; free for authors and readers | Internal Medicine (Japanese Society of Internal Medicine), Circulation Journal (Japanese Circulation Society), and others |
Typical APC ranges (as of 2026)
- Major BMC, Frontiers and MDPI journals: US\$ 2,500–3,500 (JPY 350,000–500,000)
- OA option in Springer Nature, Wiley and Elsevier hybrid journals: US\$ 3,000–4,500
- Nature-family journals, Lancet-family journals, JAMA Network Open: US\$ 5,000–12,000
- Japanese society journals (fully OA): around JPY 100,000–200,000, with member discounts
If your institution has a transformative ("Read and Publish") agreement with the publisher, your APC may be waived or reduced. A growing number of institutions in Japan hold such agreements with Wiley, Springer Nature, Elsevier and others through their university libraries, so it is worth asking your library before you submit.
Do open access journals have lower IFs?
The idea that open access means a low IF is a misconception. Critical Care (IF 11.4), Cardiovascular Diabetology (15.6) and Molecular Cancer (42.2) are all fully open access journals. That said, open access journals do tend to look lower on average than subscription journals, because their acceptance rates are higher and they publish more papers. Judge journal by journal.
Open access and peer-review quality are separate questions
Whether a journal is open access is a question of whether readers can read it for free; it says nothing about the quality of its peer review. That said, the so-called predatory journals driven by APC revenue are without exception open access, so when submitting to an open access journal, make it a habit to confirm that it is indexed in JCR or DOAJ. Every journal in our listings is indexed in JCR.