Publication charges, subject fit and the time after submission are usually found in different places. I brought them into a single HTML comparison view, starting with publication routes where the author’s article processing charge, or APC, was zero. Journal indicators and publication timing sat alongside the cost information.
The saved file contains 18 journal rows. It is an internal display of the values assembled at the time, not a current recommendation list. Opening it does not retrieve new records or check whether a journal’s charging policy has changed.
Splitting the time after submission
A manuscript can spend time waiting for acceptance and then more time waiting to appear online. I gave those intervals different colours in the chart so that a long review period would look different from a long production period. Hovering over a bar reveals the component values, the overall interval and the number of papers for which dates were available.
Where an acceptance date was missing, the display used a striped bar for the overall submission-to-publication interval instead of inventing a split. Journals without the necessary dates remained in a separate reference section. Missing information needed to stay visible; it could not sensibly count as either fast or slow publication.
The file defines speed as the median interval from receipt to online publication: the middle value after the observed paper-level intervals are put in order. This is different from a journal’s time to first decision. It also does not include the waiting times of papers rejected before publication. Those distinctions limit what the number can tell me about the likely schedule for a new submission.
Conditions behind the labels
An APC-zero label is not enough to establish every charge an author might face. No submission fee, no publication charge and an opportunity to apply for a waiver describe different arrangements. The saved comparison included warnings about additional charges, but those stored notes cannot guarantee today’s payable amount. Reusing the tool would require checking the publishing route and author charge applicable to the particular manuscript against official information.
The quartile labels in this file are Scimago SJR Q1 and Q2. They describe positions within subject categories and should not be substituted for the identically named quartiles in JCR. The file records an indicator year and data-query period. Without revisiting the underlying sources, however, I have not turned its journal-specific ranks or timing figures into recommendations here.
A separate column records whether a search found papers with an independent-researcher affiliation. I did not want a missing result to become a claim that independent researchers were ineligible. Affiliation wording can defeat a search, while a published example still says nothing certain about acceptance of my own manuscript.
What the saved interface actually does
JavaScript reads data embedded in the HTML and builds the table and bars. Each row combines the field, quartile, timing and notes; tooltips expose more detail, and a button switches between light and dark display. The file has no live data refresh or interactive candidate filter.
The reusable part is the comparison structure. Before relying on it again, I would need to attach a current official source and check date to each row, then inspect the date samples and charging conditions. As of 7 September 2026, this is an account of an internal interface, not a refreshed journal ranking or a report of measured use.