As noted in the current Cites & Insights, I’ve moved 580 DOAJ journals from Grade B to Grade A$ because the only reason to regard them as possibly requiring investigation is that they have APCs of $1,000 or more. That’s something to be aware of, and the justifications for high APCs still need discussion, but if an author has the money and finds the APC reasonable, there’s nothing else about these journals to raise concerns.
The Library Technology Reports issue this summer will reflect that change, but none of the existing C&I coverage does.
Here’s a table (that probably won’t appear in this form in the report) that shows the number of journals and 2013 articles in each grade, as revised.
| Grade | Desc. | Journals | %J | Articles | %A |
| A | Apparently good |
3,976 |
54.5% |
177,077 |
48.4% |
| A$ | Apparently good with high APC |
580 |
7.9% |
113,574 |
31.0% |
| B | May need investigation |
567 |
7.8% |
40,273 |
11.0% |
| C | Highly questionable |
294 |
4.0% |
25,284 |
6.9% |
| DC | Ceased |
263 |
3.6% |
1,362 |
0.4% |
| DD | Dying |
93 |
1.3% |
533 |
0.1% |
| DE | Erratic |
182 |
2.5% |
1,554 |
0.4% |
| DH | Hiatus? |
145 |
2.0% |
5,006 |
1.4% |
| DN | New? |
16 |
0.2% |
98 |
0.0% |
| DS | Small |
374 |
5.1% |
1,449 |
0.4% |
| E | Empty |
18 |
0.2% |
||
| EC | Empty/cancelled |
53 |
0.7% |
||
| N | Not OA |
165 |
2.3% |
||
| O | Opaque |
189 |
2.6% |
||
| X | Unreachable or unworkable |
386 |
5.3% |
||
| Total |
7,301 |
366,210 |
If you draw the conclusion from this table that journals with high APCs publish a lot of articles, you wouldn’t be wrong.
